


those old, cold, claustrophobic stars

by futuredescending



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Nightmares, Pidge | Katie Holt-centric, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2019-10-04 16:22:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17307869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futuredescending/pseuds/futuredescending
Summary: Set during early Season 7. It’s a long, slow journey back to Earth. Shiro moves in with Pidge.





	1. Chapter 1

Keith contacts her in the middle of the sleep cycle, knowing she’s awake. His voice is uncharacteristically tentative. His gaze darts around off screen, then behind him, as if he’s afraid of being overheard. Pidge cocks her head and glances at her dashboard. It’s a private line.

“Everything okay?” she asks evenly. There’s plenty of room in the question. Keith reminds her of a wounded wild animal sometimes.

“Yeah.” Keith doesn’t look at her for very long. Fiddles with Black’s controls. Pidge waits. “Listen.”

When he trails off again, Pidge frowns. Her sense of unease ratchets up a notch. There’s no immediate danger. She’d know if there was. This is worse, then. This is personal. “What’s wrong?”

“I was just wondering...maybe you could take Shiro for a little while.” Keith winces. He doesn’t mean to make it sound like Shiro’s an unruly pet that needs to be rehomed.

After a few moments to digest Keith’s request, Pidge’s frown deepens in concern. “Did something happen?” It’s careful phrasing. Not, _What did he do?_ She hates that the thought even crosses her mind, but it’s her nature. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

As if Keith reads her mind, he shakes his head more forcefully to dispel any such notions. “No. No, nothing like that.”

“Oh. That’s good.” Some tension bleeds from her spine.

Keith takes a deep breath. It all comes out at once. “He has nightmares. Every night. When I go to wake him, I think I terrify him even more. If Mom tries to wake him, it’s worse. So. I think he just needs to be around a more neutral party right now.”

Neutral. Like Pidge is an objective, disinterested observer to all this. She wants to snap at Keith, but she sees the exhaustion in his eyes. There’s a resigned weariness to his face. It makes him look like he’s aged twenty years ahead of them instead of two.

Once her initial annoyance passes, the rational side of her settles in. Keith filled them in on his and Shiro’s brutal confrontation. He kept the details sparse, but it was easy to fill in the blanks. In retrospect, it’s probably better for them to not be around each other right now.

“Okay,” she says. “When we land on the next system. We can change it up.” She doesn’t think Shiro would take to teleporting via Keith’s wolf very well.

“Okay? Okay. Good.” Keith breathes out. He seems to deflate. “If it gets to be too much, just let me know. We can always switch back.”

Warily, Pidge asks, “Why would it be too much?”

“I mean, it’s not bad,” Keith hastens to explain. “Shiro doesn’t make much noise. It’s not going to be anything like the first time.” The first time when they saddled her with everyone, animal and Altean, in revenge. That set up lasted exactly one cycle before Pidge threatened to park the Green Lion on the nearest habitable planet and dump them all off. No one listened to Lance’s suggestions after that. “In fact, outside of sleep, he doesn’t really make any noise at all. Kinda fades in and out.”

That’s not very reassuring. While she’s noticed Shiro’s more subdued manner recently, he more or less seemed aware of what was going on. Then again, she hasn’t interacted with him extensively outside of situations where they weren’t in immediate danger. “Is he...okay?”

“I think so,” Keith says. His expression says the complete opposite. “He’s just quiet. I think he just needs time. He’s been through a lot.”

“Would he even want to ride with me?” Pidge asks. That probably should have been the first question.

In answer, Keith just shrugs. “To be honest...I don’t think he cares about it either way.”

She thinks Keith means it to come off as casual. He sounds like he’s mourning someone who died.

 

_____

 

They stop on a small, marshy, and vaguely sulfuric-smelling planet to restock on fresh food and keep from going stir crazy. The wolf flashes in and out of existence around them, excited to have open air to roam or teleport or whatever cosmic wolves like to do when not confined to giant robotic lion spaceships.

“This climate is perfect for finding a few Daegas!” Coran announces. “If we’re lucky, we may come across a whole nest.”

“I know I’m going to regret this, but what are Daegas?” Lance asks.

“Daegas are small but nasty little buggers that coat themselves in a highly potent toxin!” Coran looks entirely too excited by the prospect. “They’ve got six sets of teeth that are sharp enough to cut through a tree trunk and have been known to destroy entire forests.”

Hunk looks to be on the verge of nausea. “Um, and why would we want to find these things again?”

“They’re some of the tastiest meat this side of the universe!” Coran enthuses. “Many cultures consider Daega flesh a decadent delicacy because they’re very difficult to kill without either dying one’s self or being seriously maimed.”

“And there’s the regret,” Lance says. “Yeah, I think I’m gonna pass.”

Instead, Hunk makes Lance wade through the swamps with him to forage for anything their scanners deem edible. It’s so quiet here that Lance’s complaining travels easily across the tall reeds and grass to their little encampment.

Keith marches a docile Shiro over to her like he’s dropping off his kid on the first day of school. He even carries a small bag of what Pidge guesses are all of Shiro’s possessions. It’s light enough that she suspects it only contains clothes.

She puts on her most gameful smile. “Everything ready?”

“Yeah.” Keith glances at Shiro, like he’s expecting a response.

Shiro just stares at some middle point between them.

”Is Shiro...?” Pidge asks.

”Yeah,” Keith says with a false note of brightness. “It was just a bad night.”

“Is this quicksand?” Lance asks in a panicky tone from across a long stretch of marsh. “Am I sinking? Oh god, I’m sinking.”

“It’s mud and water,” they hear Hunk say. “You’re not sinking. It’s just a little deeper over there. Come stand over here by me. I need you to hold the bag.”

“Oh. Do you think this mud would be good for face masks?”

“You should probably scan it to see what it’s made of first.”

“Eh, where’s the fun in that? I think I’m gonna risk it.”

Hunk’s long-suffering sigh is a common refrain.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Keith finally says. His hand makes to touch Shiro’s shoulder, but he thinks better of it at the last second. Too many quickfire emotions flicker across his face for Pidge to read. He walks away like a man weighed down by defeat.

“Oh god,” Lance says. “Something just brushed past my leg! Is it one of those Dagger things?”

“Daegas,” Coran corrects him. “And hmm, it could be. The swamp is their preferred feeding grounds!”

“What? You couldn’t have said that _before_ we waded in?”

“Okay. So.” Pidge considers the best way to urge Shiro onto Green. She thinks it would be weird to hold his hand, but there’s no other less awkward place on him she can reach. “We’re leaving soon, Shiro. Maybe you’d like to come with me this time?”

It’s not really a question, nor does she want to sound so condescending, but Shiro has about as much presence as a boulder and Pidge isn’t sure how to make him move. Eventually, she does reach out and gingerly takes his hand. He doesn’t really grasp hers back, but he doesn’t try to move his hand away either. He doesn’t react at all.

“He’s not really all there, is he?”

Pidge startles, dropping Shiro’s hand to fetch her bayard before whirling around and coming face to face with Lance. His face is coated in brown sludge. He looks ridiculous. “Geez, Lance! Don’t sneak up on someone like that!”

Lance raises his hands and steps back. He knows very well the sting her bayard can inflict. “Sorry.” His contrition lasts a few more ticks before it melts away in the face of his morbid curiosity as he continues to stare at Shiro. “Do you think he can even hear us?”

He learns forward and waves his hand in front of Shiro’s face. Pidge smacks it away. “Of course he can hear us. Stop treating him like he’s an idiot, especially when you’re the one with swamp mud on your face.”

“This is spa-level mud, excuse you. And I don’t think he’s an idiot,” Lance says. “I just hope Allura put him back right. It kinda seems like she missed a few key parts.”

“Why don’t you ask Allura yourself?”

As if realizing what he’s just said, Lance flushes. “Or he just needs more time. It’s good that he’s staying with you. He creeps me out like this, Allura would feel too guilty for making him a walking vegetable, Hunk would try to feed him to death, and Keith doesn’t exactly have the patience of a saint.”

Pidge finally figures out that if she takes Shiro’s hand and starts walking, he will match her pace and follow. The image of leading a broken-in horse comes to mind and she wishes it doesn’t. He follows her onto the Green Lion and stops in the middle of its small cargo hold when Pidge lets go of his hand to corral all her Pygmy Puffs back to the fold.

If Shiro were more aware of his surroundings, she’d be embarrassed at how cluttered her Lion is, full of scraps and gadgets and machinery parts and little tokens of all the places they’ve been. There isn’t a lot of room to move without having to shift around a few disorganized piles of stuff and leftover trash. She may have to admit she’s a bit of a hoarder.

At least Shiro doesn’t seem to care, or if he does, he won’t show it.

“I think you’d better sit down,” she tells him when they’re ready to go. “The Lions aren’t exactly accommodating to other passengers, as you know. Take-offs and landings are kinda rough.”

She doesn’t expect a response, but she also doesn’t expect the total lack of reaction.

”Shiro? Don’t you want to sit down?” When nothing happens, Pidge readjusts her glasses. “Okay. Um. I guess we’ll try something else.” Hesitantly, she reaches out and touches Shiro’s torso through his remaining Paladin armor and nudges him towards her bed like they’re performing some sort of clumsy shuffling dance. She’s grateful that no one else is here to witness this.

She’s never quite appreciated the comical difference in their sizes until she has to dig her heels in and throw her entire body into getting him to move backwards, grunting all the while. When the backs of his legs hit the edge of the bed frame, she gives him a stronger push and he sits down heavily. They are suddenly at eye level with each other.

For a moment, she thinks she sees awareness in his eyes and sucks in a sharp breath. “Hey.”

But whatever is there is gone quickly, or maybe she only imagined it. There’s nothing in Shiro’s gaze except a dull, thousand-yard stare.

She returns to the pilot seat and straps in. Green rouses to life as soon as her hands touch the controls and their connection sparks awake between them her mind like the first birdsong at dawn. That’s what Green is like for her: a forest spectrum of life and tranquility on one end and nature’s brutality on the other.

If she turns her head and looks over her shoulder, she can just make out part of Shiro’s form sitting on her bed, still as a statue. She doesn’t even have that creepy sensation of someone watching her crawling along her neck. It’s a little like Lance said, she guiltily thinks, Shiro isn’t really all there. 

But Lance is wrong about one crucial thing. For Shiro, Keith has all the patience in the universe. For Shiro, Keith waits forever.

 

_____

 

It’s pretty quiet in her Lion. If she doesn’t want the constant chatter of everyone buzzing through the cockpit, she just mutes them, curls up in the pilot’s chair, and lets the ultimate silence of space settle over her. The Pygmy Puffs don’t make noise and the only other sentient creature on board with her doesn’t either.

She actually forgot about the whole ‘Shiro has nightmares’ part of what Keith had said. Stupid of her.

When she finally manages to nod off, it doesn’t even feel like it’s been more than a few dobashes before she’s abruptly plunged back into startling alertness, heart pumping adrenaline through her veins, all her senses electrified and battle ready.

Screaming. Horrible, blood curdling screaming.

“Shiro!” She’s never heard him sound like that before.

Pidge falls out of her chair when she tries to get out of it, too tangled up in the blanket to have much grace. When she gets her feet back under her and runs to Shiro, she finds him still caught up in the throes of terror, his remaining hand pinned at his side like he can’t move it, clawing desperately at the mattress.

Keith used a lot of caution when touching Shiro. She knows how dangerous it is to attempt waking a trained fighter, nevermind a traumatized one, but Shiro is screaming and screaming and it’s burning through Pidge’s ears and all her common sense, rebounding inside her skull, and it’s truly, deeply frightening.

“Shiro? Shiro! Wake up! It’s just a nightmare.” Her hands find Shiro’s shoulders. She shakes them as much as she can, which is not very much at all. “You’re safe! You’re on the Green Lion. I’m Pidge. Shiro, you’re safe! You’re safe.”

You’re safe you’re safe you’re safe.

She repeats it so many times, shaking him, touching his face, she’s not sure what she’s even saying anymore. She’s sweating profusely. It drips into her eyes and stings. Her glasses steam up. She can feel her undersuit sticking to her back.

Shiro’s eyes fly open. His pupils are wide enough to almost swallow the gray. His hand shoots up and circles her neck, trying to squeeze her heart out of her throat.

“It’s okay!” Pidge cries and chokes, because something wild and terrible has loosened the dam and turned her into a shaky wet mess. It’s her way immediate go-to stress reliever. Hunk vomits and Lance cracks off-putting jokes and Pidge dehydrates herself by emitting all the liquids from her body out of her eyes and skin pores. But it also means Shiro’s fingers have a hard time maintaining their tight grasp over her slick skin. She can find pockets to breathe and cry and wheeze, scratching frantically at his fingers to remove the vice around her neck like a crazed animal ready to gnaw off its own foot to escape a trap. “It’s okay, you’re safe. You’re on the Green Lion. I’m Pidge. I’m Pidge. Shiro. I’m Pidge!”

A terrifying thought crosses her mind: if Shiro isn’t really there, what’s to stop him from killing her?

So gradually she doesn’t even notice it at first, Shiro’s hand loosens its hold until it drops away altogether. He looks at her, then her marred throat. He’s awake.

As terrifying as his blank face had been, this one is even worse. It’s self-loathing and misery and hollowness. “I’m sorry,” he gasps. “I’m sorry.”

Pidge collapses somewhere between the wall and the bed, her entire body drained of energy and animus. Her heart still thuds painfully in her chest. The fleeting edges of lingering fear lick at the edges of her mind. She wants to run away from this man who can so easily kill her.

“Could’ve been worse,” she croaks through her swelling throat. It hurts. She gently tries to massage it, but the skin feels tender and sore under her fingers. “Could’ve still had your other arm.”

She meant it to relieve the tension and her fear. Upon reflection, it’s not funny at all. Had he his cybernetic arm, Shiro would have cleaved her head entirely off. His face crumples. His whole body begins to fold in on itself as far away from Pidge as he can get on the bed.

“Shiro…”

“I shouldn’t stay here,” Shiro says. “It’s not safe.”

But there’s nowhere else he can go. Keith is probably the most equipped to handle Shiro, but he can’t do it right now, so they have no other choice. They’ve been forced to make the most of a bunch of bad choices since this whole crazy ride began.

A swift and sudden anger spikes through her. She doesn’t know where it comes from, or why, but there’s no outlet for it except in honed words, even if they target one of the least deserving people of them. “We’re in the middle of a war. Nowhere’s safe. So get over yourself, Shiro! We need you!”

Shiro stares at her with wide eyes. Pidge wishes she could rewind time. She opens her mouth to apologize immediately. It’s not what she meant at all.

“You’re right,” Shiro whispers, looking away again. Pidge recognizes the feeling this time. Shame. “You’re right. Things are very mixed up for me right now. I’m finding it very hard to, to think clearly. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Pidge says, desperate to make Shiro understand. “None of this is your fault. I’m sorry I yelled. I wish I knew how to fix this.”

Shiro grabs his hair with his hand, pulling on the white strands like he wishes he could weed out all the other shadows in his head too.

His next words, quiet and almost conversational in their factual tone, chill Pidge to the core.

“Keith should have let me die.”

 

_____

 

Pidge imagines Allura’s hands are cool and soothing. At least that is how they appear to be when they touch Shiro’s face, a palm across his forehead, one cradling his jaw. She is the only being Shiro will allow to touch him now.

Shiro’s eyes are closed. His face is relaxed. They don’t speak, but Pidge can’t help thinking something is being communicated silently between them.

After awhile, Allura opens her eyes. “Physically, he is doing well.” Her hand fall away from Shiro after one last affectionate touch to the top of his head. There’s a lot more in what she doesn’t say. “I can sense no further issues with the transfer.”

Pidge never thought there were any. She looks over at Shiro, who still has his eyes closed, seemingly oblivious to his stated prognosis. Pidge wonders if he went away again. He hasn’t spoken a word since his last terrible declaration.

Allura eyes Pidge’s throat. “That, however, looks painful.” She stretches out a hand and Pidge flinches back. Allura immediately retracts. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t,” Pidge lies. “I just wasn’t expecting it.”

“I can’t completely heal your injuries, but I can channel energy to the site of inflammation to help promote your body’s own natural self-repair process. You should recover much faster. If that’s alright.”

The thought of hands anywhere near her throat makes her sick. Pidge nods. “Okay.”

Allura reaches out more slowly this time, obviously telegraphing her intentions. Pidge swallows painfully and the braces herself for the contact. She holds still when she feels Allura’s cool fingers at her throat. Allura’s touch is light, a feather brush. Soon, though, a growing warmth blossoms beneath her fingers and spreads, radiating outwards from the point of contact like ripples in the water.

Something happens. Pidge doesn’t know what. Allura pulls back and the warmth fades, but something lingers. “There.”

“Thanks,” Pidge says, gingerly touching her neck. Her throat doesn’t feel so tight and swollen anymore. “For all of this. And for not telling the others what happened.”

Allura frowns. “I can’t say I enjoy keeping secrets from the others, but this isn’t mine to tell. However, I really must ask, Pidge, if you truly believe it’s safe for the two of you to remain in this situation.”

Pidge can’t help quirking a smile at Allura’s polite phrasing. “I’ll be fine. It was my fault anyway. Next time, I’ll be much more careful.”

Allura looks like she doesn’t quite believe her, which is a fair assessment. Pidge knows she presents the image of a battered housewife, but she doesn’t want to bring the others into this mess. She just doesn’t know if it’s because she’d be more worried for them or for Shiro.

There is something so very obviously wrong with Shiro, but she doesn’t want the rest of them to know just how much. She has to be strong enough to handle this on her own.

In their minor staredown, it’s Allura who breaks first. She sighs and drops her hands from where they were folded across her chest. “Just promise me that if something like this happens again, you’ll at least inform me.”

“I will,” Pidge lies again.

It is convincing enough, or it’s all Allura senses she’ll get for today. “Then I best be getting back to my Lion before Hunk starts in on breakfast.” She gently takes hold of the wolf’s scruff. With one last look at Shiro that contains elements of sadness and guilt, Allura teleports back to Blue. They are alone again.

Pidge glances over at Shiro. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was the picture of zen. “Did you catch all that?”

Unsurprisingly, Shiro doesn’t answer her.

 

_____

 

She’s in the middle of Killbot Phantasm Level 82 when Shiro’s screaming tears through the silence of the cabin. Even when awake and hyperalert, the sound sends a spike of fear through her, raising the hairs on her arms, her heart speeding faster than a wormhole.

This time, she approaches Shiro with far more wariness. She is grateful that Shiro’s nightmares don’t seem to include re-enactments of the fights he’s had, but in some ways it’s worse to know that Shiro’s greatest fears are those of being tied down and rendered so helpless, he cannot even escape the prison his mind has recreated for him.

His body is a rigid tense line on the bed, his arm twitching but otherwise remaining at his side. His back arcs and strains against his invisible bonds so severely, Pidge is worried he will snap his spine in two. He opens his mouth and another horrible sound pours out of it, animalistic and agonized.

She feels the pinprick of tears begin to sting her eyes. Her skin feels hot and itchy. Her throat feels clogged by the memory of a brutal hand.

“Shiro,” she says, maintaining a healthy distance between them. “Please wake up. You’re just dreaming. It’s not real.”

It’s not very effective. She can’t even hear herself over Shiro’s screams. “Okay, Plan B then.”

Plan B isn’t much of a plan. It’s a last resort. Pidge quickly gathers her Pygmy Puffs together and informs them of what she wants. Then they silently drift over to Shiro like a colorful fluffy cloud, unheeding of his horrendous animal noises, and fall softly across his face, his chest, and his quivering stomach, brushing his skin softly with their floof.

The knot in Shiro’s brow deepens. Moments of confusion break into his terrified expression. His screams taper off into wails and then moans and then whimpers. His head whips to the side, dislodging one of the Pygmies, but it just resettles across Shiro’s cheek.

“There,” Pidge tells Shiro once it grows significantly quieter. “See? You’re somewhere safe. The Pygmies are soft. They’re gentle. Feel them. Touch them. You’re safe, Shiro.”

When his whimpers fade into deep panting, Shiro slowly opens his eyes, still caught between awake and dreaming. He blinks slowly, then frowns, trying to turn his head to see what’s on his face.

“Welcome back,” Pidge says, gripping the wall so her shaky knees don’t give way.

Shiro suddenly sits up to Pygmies falling into his lap. He stares down at them in bewilderment, before looking up at Pidge. “Did I hurt you?” His voice is raw.

“Nope!” she chirps, trying to stifle her manic grin. “And no Pygmies were hurt in the process either.”

Waking up so relatively peacefully seems to put Shiro more out of sorts than usual, as if he does not know what to do with himself when he can’t apologize for something. Pidge edges her way forward until she can sit on the end of the bed. The dim light makes the shadows beneath Shiro’s eyes look like dark, depthless lakes across his pale skin. “Do you think you can fall back asleep this time?”

Shiro opens his mouth automatically, but then pauses. “I-I...I don’t know. I was dreaming. It was bad. But now I can’t remember what it was.”

Her curiosity finally gets the best of her. “Was it like this back in Black?”

Shiro shoots her a wounded expression. It’s a sore topic. “I don’t sleep well. When I do...it’s rarely peaceful. But sometimes, if I was lucky, I could exhaust myself into not dreaming.” His hand absently reaches out to stroke one of the Pygmies. Its eyes close in bliss. “Since I woke up in this body...I don’t know. I tried to stay awake to tire myself out, but I can’t seem to do that anymore. I’m exhausted all the time, but it makes no difference. This brain remembers things so vividly. Things that were fading from my mind before. Now everything feels sharp and raw and hard. It’s like reliving it all over again.”

Sometimes, Pidge's dreams turn sour. She dreams of finding Matt’s grave, but his body is decomposing beneath his grave marker. She dreams of Zarkon shooting her father before her eyes. She dreams of Galra ripping her apart. She dreams of dying, cold and alone, in the vastness of space, with no one ever knowing. She dreams of waking up to Shiro on top of her, crazed, his hands, both human and Galra, circled around her throat, squeezing and squeezing. That last one is still too fresh in her mind. She wakes up with the acrid taste of fear on the back of her tongue.

“I hear that sleeping next to something warm can help,” Pidge says. “The Pygmies used to keep me company. I figured they could do the same for you now. They’re sort of like...stuffed animals.”

“So you piled a bunch of them on me?” A corner of Shiro’s mouth quirks up in faint amusement. “I think I’d be afraid of squishing one.”

“You won’t.” Her Pygmies are smart. They know when to get out of the way. They are certainly smarter than Pidge in that regard. “And they helped you now, didn’t they? You should try going back to sleep with them.”

“I’m taking up your bed,” Shiro says like he’s only just realized his imposition.

Pidge shrugs. “I can sleep pretty well in my chair. I’m small.”

“You can have it back,” Shiro insists. “I don’t get much sleep anyway.”

“Bullshit,” Pidge says. They both widen their eyes. She flushes. “Sorry. I just mean, you need sleep, Shiro. No offense, but you look like you could use it.”

But Shiro just shakes his head stubbornly. “A bed isn’t going to make much of difference in how much sleep I don’t get.”

“Just...won’t you try it my way for once?” Pidge asks, knowing her expression is wide and pleading. She has perfected it against her father and brother often enough. “If it doesn’t work out, we can do something else.”

Satisfactorily, Shiro caves in just like the others. “Fine. Just this once.” He braces his hand against the mattress and slowly lies back down, making sure no Pygmies will be in his way.

Pidge bites back a smile as she piles the Pygmies on and around Shiro until he looks like the center of a very fluffy flower. She wishes her cell phone was close enough for her to take a stealth picture. “Comfy?”

“This feels weird,” Shiro admits. “My head feels like it’s literally wrapped in wool.”

“You look kinda adorable. Like a toy lion.”

It’s a silly thing to say to a serious situation, but it makes Shiro laugh. It is one of the most uplifting sounds Pidge has heard in a long time.


	2. Chapter 2

Pidge is a light sleeper when she bothers to sleep at all, dragged kicking and screaming into slumber, then blindly leaping into consciousness, wired and alert. That’s why it’s completely disorienting when the next thing she knows, she’s fighting to shake off the last vestiges of a heavy sleep, struggling to surface into the world of the waking.

Warm. Comfortable. They are the two most prominent sensations that filter through her foggy brain, followed quickly by a self-assessment checklist. She isn’t sluggish, so she wasn’t drugged. Green is a safe womb all around her, so she isn’t kidnapped.

When the blurriness is rubbed from her eyes, she turns and finds the long lines of Shiro’s legs next to her. She sits up on the end of the bed and blinks. Shiro is still covered in Pygmies. He lies on his back, arm lax over his stomach. His face is slack, his breaths are deep and even. She had meant to stay up and guard for any more intrusive terrors, but Shiro is sleeping well, and apparently, so was she.

She wants to get up and work some circulation back into her limbs, but she is loath to upset this careful and very much needed respite. So, she puts her back up against the wall and tries to resume her watch from before her slip. It feels easier now, being this well rested. There is a whole well of renewed reserves within her. Her mom is probably right: she should try doing the sleeping thing more often.

Being so awake with nothing to occupy her mind, though, is a different kind of challenge. Her fingers twitch, wishing she had thought to bring her game console with her, or at least a tablet. Instead, she has at her disposal only what her eyes can see, and after her eyes roam over the piles of stuff all over the cabin, they end up back on Shiro himself, or more specifically, Shiro’s morning wood tenting his sleep pants. The length of it looks to be well proportioned to a man of his size, she idly notes before she can stop her brain from thinking that. He probably doesn’t suffer from that particular insecurity.

Her face immediately heats up in embarrassment. An uncomfortable itchy sensation prickles at her skin. It’s not—she’s not scandalized by it, per se. Pretending she was a boy and being housed in close quarters with them in the Garrison desensitized her to naked male bodies pretty quickly. It’s just that of all the things she’s thought about Shiro, never once did ‘healthy young human biological male in his twenties’ occur to her, but here they are.

It’s the reminder of that human part that’s most shocking, is the thing. Not that she ever considered Shiro to be anything less, but maybe she always had the impression he was something more by sheer fact that he has already done far more than anyone else could or even _would_.

He’s their leader who will always guide them when they are lost. He’s their protector who will always sacrifice his life to keep them safe.

But it is unfair of her to put all of that on the shoulders of a man who isn’t actually that much older than she is herself, she is beginning to realize.

So caught up in having epiphanies centered around Shiro’s dick, Pidge doesn’t even notice Shiro is awake until she feels his eyes on her. She slowly looks up from his groin to meet them, and there’s no way to pretend she hasn’t noticed.

“Good morning,” she says, high pitched and strangled.

“Hi,” he says.

“You slept better.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. He finally breaks his gaze off to stare at the ceiling. He holds himself very still as if to not draw further attention to their predicament. The Pygmies don’t stir.

“So…” Pidge trails off. “This is awkward.”

“Yeah.” She can almost hear Shiro’s mortification when he clears his throat. “Sorry.”

“It’s natural. It’s fine. I’ve caught Lance in way more compromising positions.”

From the corner of her eye, she sees Shiro wrinkling his nose. She smirks.

“And besides,” she continues, “we’re in some pretty tight quarters for awhile. Things were bound to get a little awkward eventually, right?”

“True.”

“So, it’s all good. I mean, you could even deal with it if you want,” she says quickly, before her brain catches up with her mouth. “Obviously not right now. But it’s bound to be a reoccurring issue. You’ll have to at some point, right? It’s healthy.”

“Can we...can we stop talking about this?” Shiro pleads.

“There isn’t anywhere you can go for privacy except the storage closet,” Pidge forges on like a runaway train, to Shiro’s increasing horror. “But it’s already, um, kinda full. There’s the lav, but it’s really tiny. In fact, you’re going to have a hard time in there as it is. I mean, to do what it’s meant for. In there. So I can just go to the cockpit and put my headphones on, and you can let me know when you’re done.”

When she works up the courage to glance at Shiro’s face, it’s the most red she’s ever seen it.

“...I’m going to go to the cockpit now,” Pidge squeaks. She leaps up from the bed like it’s on fire. “Just let me know when it’s okay to return.”

“Pidge…”

“I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. Just pretend like I’m not even here.” She tosses a wave over her shoulder.

She doesn’t turn back around. She doesn’t run, but it’s close.

 

_____

 

Soon, far sooner than Pidge would have thought, Shiro’s hand touches her shoulder. She jumps and peels the headphones from her ears. Gives him a quick once over. Condition abated. She stares at Shiro’s hand. She hopes he washed it.

“That was fast,” she blurts out. “...I didn’t mean it like that.”

She looks up into Shiro’s unimpressed face. “I didn’t. For your information.”

“Oh.” She doesn’t know why she sounds so disappointed by that fact. It’s weird. Judging by the look Shiro gives her, he thinks so too.

“Let’s not speak of this again,” Shiro suggests, then looks pained. “Please.”

“Deal,” she readily agrees. Too much of the day has already been taken up by the concerns of Shiro’s dick.

 

_____

 

“How is he?” Keith asks during one of their routine secret check-ins.

“Improving,” Pidge says. “We found a process that reduces the number of nightmares he has. He’s sleeping better. His moments of awareness are becoming longer and more frequent.”

She doesn’t tell him about the lowest point they reached. Keith knows she elides things and doesn’t push for more.

“That’s great. I’m glad he has you, Pidge.” Keith tries to smile. It looks like it pains him to do so. 

She gets it.

 

_____

 

One point five years sounded like an impossibly long journey, but the full impact of that length doesn’t really set in until...right about now.

It’s the long, uniform hours that don’t change from day to night.

It’s the static view outside, an endless black sea of distant stars and even more distant, empty planets.

It’s scanning and scanning for nearby signs of life, anything, and getting nothing but the interminable white noise of nothingness back.

It’s the small, unchanging walls of their lions that somehow feel like they’re closing in anyway.

It’s Lance repeating the same jokes for the 80th time. Or listening to Keith and Lance snipe at each other for the 200th.

It’s eating tasteless shelf stable food rations when they haven’t found enough fresh resources to make a palatable meal. It’s trying to sleep in that uncomfortable pilot chair to the point where she may have permanent kinks in her back.

It’s the aggravation of turning around in her chair to find Shiro staring at a wall, unmoving, for god knows how long.

It’s the same people, it’s the same thing, movement after movement after movement. She’s tired of hearing her own voice in one-sided conversations.

They’re not even a quarter of the way through yet.

 

_____

 

Eventually even Shiro has his breaking point. He finally agrees to play video games with her.

He’s...really terrible at Killbot, but his handicap is quite literal. Pidge can’t trash talk him like she would anyone else.

After losing his last life on Level 7, Shiro tosses his controller away from him in disgust. There’s an actual pout on his face. “This is pointless.”

“I didn’t think you were a quitter,” Pidge says disapprovingly.

It’s a low blow. Shiro’s cheek ticks. He really does hate losing. “Kinda hard to play when you have to henpeck at the buttons.”

“You weren’t doing that bad,” she lies.

Shiro glares at her, but the effect is kind of lost because the Pygmies now think Shiro is their personal perch and he always has at least a few clinging to him at all times like static electricity.

“Maybe we can find something else to do.”

There really isn’t anything else to do except stare at the unchanging monitors. Shiro once tried organizing all her stuff, but gave up when he realized there wasn’t so much as a shelving unit to store them in. Still, all her things is now in tidy, taxonomic piles, which is convenient if unnecessary. It’s not like she can really work on any projects without a proper lab setup.

“Like what? Label all your scrap metal?” Shiro’s hand flexes open and closed, open and closed, to match the rhythmic clenching of his teeth. His eyes constantly dart around their small space, like he’ll find something amiss if he just looks hard enough. Pidge can practically feel the restlessness pouring off him like a caged tiger.

It’s actually starting to get to her, like an annoying itch under her skin. Shiro’s a very gracious winner, but find one thing he’s not so good at, and the pristine mirror tarnishes a little.

“Maybe you really should just jerk off.” Okay, so her own reserves are starting to wear thin too. The first to go offline, apparently, is her brain to mouth filter. 

Everything comes to a standstill. Shiro balks at her. “What?”

She’s had a lot of time—frankly, too much time—to think about this. “You’re tense. You’re antsy. You’re in a small space with nowhere to go.”

Shiro sinks his head into his hand. His words are muffled against his palm. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this again. We agreed not to talk about this again.”

“You’re not...fading out as much anymore,” Pidge says after a careful consideration of her word choice, “but that means being excruciatingly present for every moment here, and there’s been nothing to fight lately.”

“I can’t believe I’m talking about this with _Matt’s little sister_.”

“And when there was, you….” Pidge stops. Whoops.

When no more cringeworthy words are forthcoming, Shiro drops his hand and looks over at her. He sees her guilty expression and connects the dots. “I was useless.”

“That’s not true. That’s not—”

“No, it’s alright,” Shiro says, understanding and supportive to the last, even when it’s to denigrate his own character. “I can’t fight like this. I’m not a paladin. There’s nothing else I can currently do for the team that someone can’t do better or faster. The best I can hope for right now is to not be too much of a liability.”

Summed up so unflinchingly, Pidge struggles to find her next counter-argument. “You’re more than that. You’re always there for us. We can come to you about anything and you always know how to say the right thing.”

“No one comes to me about anything now,” Shiro says simply. “And I can’t say I blame them. I did try to blow everyone up.”

“Your evil clone. Not you. We trust you.”

“You built a back door into my arm long before this.”

She stares at him, caught out.

“It was smart of you to do that,” Shiro reassures her. “How can anyone trust me when I can’t even trust myself?”

“That’s not why….” Pidge takes a deep breath. She’s not very good at these sorts of talks. That’s what Shiro was supposed to do. “We’re just trying to give you space. We’re worried about you.”

Shiro bows his head. A Pygmy lands on the back of his neck. His shoulders twitch.

She needs to save this. Or at least prevent another round of self-loathing and recriminations. Well, she knows one way. “Which is why I really think you should find some other method to relieve your stress.”

Shiro groans and eyes the space above him like he’s silently praying to a higher deity for patience or possibly to be sucked out into space. “And somehow, we’ve come full circle.”

“The endorphin release alone would do wonders for your brain’s chemical balance.”

“We’re really doing this.” She sees the moment when something in Shiro’s brain switches gears. His shoulders square. The look in his eye is battle ready. “Fine. We can talk about me jerking off, but while we’re on the subject of biological functions, let’s also discuss your menstrual cycles. How’s that going for you, Pidge?”

“Touché,” Pidge says. He certainly isn’t afraid of going where many a man fears to tread. Shiro looks at her smugly. When she’s sure he thinks he’s won, she goes in for the kill. “But, if you’re curious. I use a menstrual cup. It’s more environmentally sustainable, and tampons or sanitary napkins would have been a little indiscreet when I was pretending to be a boy. Of course, I wasn’t menstruating when we left Earth, but it was pretty easy to fabricate one back in the Castle to the exact specifications of my vag—”

“Okay, I get it. I get it.” Shiiro is practically leaning away from her, hand held up in defeat or perhaps to ward her off.

Pidge smirks. As if anyone could gross her out when it comes to science.

“If I...I can’t believe I’m saying this...if I...agree to try it once…” Shiro looks like he’d rather cut off his remaining arm. “Can we never talk about this again? And this time, I mean it.”

Pidge considers it. “Yeah, okay.” She looks at Shiro expectantly.

There’s a beat of silence. Then:

“Er.” Shiro frowns, uncertain. “Right now?”

“No time like the present to give it the old college try, right?” Pidge says before hopping up. “I’ll be in the cockpit, blasting music at max. Let me know when you finish! Well, preferably a few minutes after that, actually.”

 

_____

 

At a time, a much later time than Pidge was anticipating, to the point where she isn’t sure if she ought to check up on how it’s all...coming, Shiro thankfully stops her from having to make that awful decision by touching her shoulder. She shuts off her music and her tablet of calculations. She looks up at him, trying to determine if there’s anything different.

“Well?” she asks when Shiro doesn’t say anything. “Feel better?”

“I couldn’t do it.”

“What? Why not?” Suspicious, she has to ask, ”Did you even try?”

“Look,” Shiro says, scowling at her in a way that reminds her of Keith. “I was hardly in the mood. It’s cold and sterile. There were...Pygmy Puffs everywhere. It was weird. I couldn’t even...start.”

“Oh.” Even now, two Pygmies sit on Shiro’s shoulder, staring back down at her. Shiro may have a point. “I’m pretty sure Lance has downloaded plenty of porn. I bet you could find something to get in the mood if you don’t mind, uh, some unusual alien anatomy...”

“No,” Shiro says quickly. “Absolutely not. And just so you know, we’re done with this forever. Deal’s a deal. Why are you so fixated on this in the first place?”

The question makes her stop and think. She doesn’t have a ready answer on hand. She just got caught up in the moment while looking for something to do, cottoned on to the teasing humor of it all, and then, because she’s also competitive and likes to win, she had to dig her heels in. But why bother in the first place? “You’re always trying to take care of us. Maybe someone should take care of you for a change.”

Shiro’s gaze softens. “The gesture is kind of creepy and intrusive, but the thought is greatly appreciated. Thank you.”

Pidge smiles. “That’s what family is for.”

 

_____

 

Bob’s kidnapping or dream or bizarre mass hallucination happens. It’s weird. Sometimes the universe is just too weird for even Pidge. She one day hopes to reach Coran’s level of adaptability, but she’s just not there yet, short lived, pathetic human creature that she is.

They’re all a little jittery after. There are things out there that could attack at any moment. Beings they can’t fight and can only outwit or escape by some sheer stroke of luck. Without fully powered lions or the ability to form Voltron, they’re mostly just sitting ducks.

“Maybe Keith didn’t get to suck on enough binkies as a child,” Lance muses over the comms. “That would explain why he is the way he is.”

“Lance,” Keith warns.

“I made sure to see to every one of Keith’s needs when he was an infant,” Krolia fiercely informs them, lest they further impugn her maternal abilities. It’s admittedly a sensitive topic for her. “I fed him from my teat even when his sharp teeth cut and rended my flesh.”

Predictably, Lance starts chortling obnoxiously.

“Oh my god. _Mom_ ,” Keith’s chokes.

“That’s an image I will never be able to unsee,” Hunk whines.

“I hadn’t realized Galra babies had their incisors come in so early,” Coran muses.

“Yes. It’s a mark of strength to continue providing our young with milk as long as possible,” Krolia says. “It’s why Galra don’t have many children. Galra mothers usually don’t have enough breast tissue after the second child.”

“They...the babies chew them off?” Hunk asks in horror.

“Please, please stop,” Keith begs.

“No, no keep going, keep going!” Lance urges.

“Keith, I know I was not many things to you, but your friends should know that your small female stature does not stem from insufficient sustenance.”

“Oh my god,” Lance wheezes.

“ _Mom!_ ”

As another round of insults and way too much information flies back and forth across the comms, Pidge sighs and mutes them all again. Out of habit, she checks up on Shiro. He’s standing, gazing out at the stars, unblinking and remote, but she can tell he’s at least still here with her.

Before she can open her mouth, Shiro sighs. “I’m fine, Pidge.”

“It’s just that when you’re quiet, I worry.”

“Never was much of a talker.”

He’s in a funk. Pidge is becoming very well versed in Shiro’s moods and mannerisms now. “I wonder why Bob didn’t bring you in too.”

“I guess it’s because I wasn’t a paladin.” There’s a bitter cast to his words. Hit the target in one. But being right doesn’t feel so victorious anymore.

“But you’re still a part of this team. You always will be.”

Shiro smiles like he doesn’t really believe her. Pidge doesn’t try to convince him otherwise. The words sound empty even to her by now, she’s said them so many times. Saving themselves the effort of rehashing another worn out conversation, Shiro shifts gears. “Have you given any thought about what you’ll do when all of this is over?”

“I guess...back to school.” Pidge shrugs. The answer falls flat, but she doesn’t know what else to say. The word _after_ feels about as far away from her as Earth does right now. “I wanted to make software programs and robots. Before the Garrison.”

“Sounds like you’re already ahead of schedule,” Shiro says.

By necessity and under fire, they both know. “What about you?”

A troubled look ripples across Shiro’s face. “I don’t know. I never really planned that far ahead.” His hand subconsciously flexes at his side. “If the Garrison doesn’t throw us all in quarantine for the rest of our lives...I guess I’ll retire. That would probably be for the best.”

“Retire?” Pidge echoes. There’s something in his wording that strikes her as off. “Wait. Do you mean...as soon as we get back to Earth? You’re done?”

“I did say before that I can no longer provide much value to this team….”

“You can’t quit!” Pidge says. “The war isn’t over yet! Shiro—”

“Do you want to know one of the best things I ever learned, Pidge?” Shiro breaks in gently, cutting off her building anger at its knees. “It was knowing when to step up, and knowing when to step back.”

“Shiro….”

“It’s okay, Pidge,” Shiro says. “I’ve far exceeded whatever borrowed time I had by now. It was a good run. More than I ever could have hoped for.”

No one would know it by looking at him. His expression is calm and impenetrable. The corners of his mouth curved upwards, broadcasting strength and stoicism. His tone is unshakeable and resolute. He makes people believe in him, no matter what. Even when it’s false.

But she knows him now. She wonders if she knows him as well as Keith. There’s a part in the curtain when his gaze turns towards the universe, a crack in that stony facade.

Pidge sees.

He’s sad and tired.

He’ll do what he can for as long as this journey plays out. He’ll deal out words of encouragement and support until he runs out of oxygen. He’ll make sure each and every one of them will be okay in the end.

But privately, in truth, he’s already given up.

 

_____

 

“I think,” Pidge says after a long moment, “Shiro's depressed.”

On the holographic screen before her, Keith’s frown deepens. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, but...the textbook signs are there?” She shrugs. _Don’t shoot the messenger. Please don’t shoot._ “Lethargy, trouble sleeping, a sense of hopelessness, loss of interest in previous hobbies and activities, low sex drive, low appetite….”

“Nobody has an appetite for those rations. Wait...sex drive?”

“Anyway,” Pidge says, “I’m just telling you what I’ve observed, Keith. I could be wrong, but given everything that’s happened, it’s actually pretty understandable.”

Keith’s frown transforms into a scowl. It’s a little intimidating. “You said he was getting better.”

“He was! These things don’t always go in a straight line.” She’s been searching through everything in the universe that resembles a knowledgebase, only to come to the conclusion that aliens haven’t made much more progress in the area of mental health than humans.

“Well. Then what do we do?” His eyes beg her for guidance. She swallows.

“I don’t know, Keith. We’re not really qualified to deal with this.” Pidge curls up in her chair and clenching her hands. “But it’s not like we have a shrink on call.”

“Not like Shiro would talk to one anyway,” Keith mutters before he grits his teeth and glares at something Pidge can’t see. “Do you want me to take him?”

“No!” Pidge says forcefully, then winces when Keith gives her a startled look. “I mean, this is as stable an environment for him as it’s going to get. We shouldn’t mess that up.”

She’s admittedly making it up as she goes along, but it sounds sensible. Keith must agree because he thankfully doesn’t protest.

Pidge wipes away the thin sheen of moisture from her forehead with the back of her hand. There isn’t an easy way to tell someone like Keith, who wears his volatility like armor, that he may be the worst thing for Shiro right now.

 

_____

 

Recovery is not a straight line. It doubles back on itself, it’s irrational. One step forward, twenty steps back. Shiro sleeps well and Pidge sleeps well, and then one night, he doesn’t.

She wakes up with a kick to the face.

She’s taken to sleeping at the foot of her bed like a watchdog. It seemed to be working out. But.

The kick isn’t, thankfully, an intentional one, more of an involuntary reflex with only minimal force behind it. It strikes her cheek and jars her into consciousness like a douse of cold water.

Unintelligible muttering hisses out from between Shiro’s clenched teeth. He whips his head from side to side like he’s trying to dislodge something unseen. His body jerks in fits and starts. Pidge thinks in the next few seconds, he’ll start screaming.

She's right.

She shrinks back from it, having forgotten all its sharp, shrill edges, its fearful primitive cry. The Pygmies look at her balefully.

She presses herself back against the wall, trapped by the dangerously tense coil of his body with nowhere to go. “Shiro. Shiro, you have to wake up! Please wake up!”

Shiro opens his eyes. For a moment, Pidge doesn’t breathe. She dares to think it’s over.

“ _No!_ ” is ripped out of Shiro’s throat, barely more articulate than a growl, before he’s launching his body up, liberated from his invisible cage. She stares at him in shock.

He turns. His eyes lock with hers, blindingly bright with fury.

His hand strikes out. Pidge screams, diving off the bed and landing in a clumsy roll onto the floor. She hears the bone-crunching smash of his hand colliding with the wall where her head had just been. Her hands and feet slip across the floor as she runs for the cockpit, straining for her bayard she left on the console.

She hears the heavy fall of his feet and feels the blazing heat of his presence about to descend when her fingers grasp the cool metal handle. She turns and fires.

Shiro yelps as the bright green thread of electrified energy snakes out around him, binding his arm tightly to his torso. His whole body seizes up as the currents run through him until his legs buckle and he topples to the floor, finally knocked out.

“Oh shit.” She’s wheezing. She can’t get enough oxygen into her lungs. Her heart is trying to push itself out of her chest. “Shit, shit, shit. Oh god.”

Her shaking hands can’t hold her bayard anymore. It clatters to the ground.

The gasps turn into heaves, and then she can’t hold the tidal wave back as her sobs fill the cabin, leaking out through her hands.

For the first time, her resolve crumbles.

For the first time, she thinks, _I don’t know if I can do this._


	3. Chapter 3

“Please, Pidge,” Allura says quietly. There’s an undercurrent in her voice. Pleading. “Let me take Shiro back to the Blue Lion. There are more than enough of us to manage if it happens again.”

Her whole head feels stuffy. Her injured cheek is numb and swollen, like she lodged a golf ball in it, even after Allura’s help. Pidge sniffs and glances back at Shiro. He knocked over and scattered all his tidy piles of her junk in backing himself into the furthest corner away from them. His whole body curls into the wall as if he’s trying to dissolve himself into it. He won’t speak to them.

Like this, in the quiet aftermath, with her pulsing fear receding like a fading dream, she just feels dull. She just wants to go to sleep, but the thought of her bed makes dread curdle in her stomach.

“It would be like a rejection.” Pidge shakes her head. Her cheek throbs. “I can’t do that.”

“But…” Allura shakes her head, momentarily at a loss for words. _Sputtering_. Pidge has never seen her do that before. “Why?”

Pidge prides herself on knowing the answer to many if not most things, or at least making some very good educated guesses. But something like this? She’s at a loss. Her inner voice of reason has been screaming the very same question. “Because it’s important.” 

“Your safety and well-being are far more important!” Exasperation seeps into Allura’s tone, clipping her words even further. She visibly pulls herself back as if realizing the misdirection of her emotions, then says, more softly, “Even Shiro would agree with that.”

Pidge glares at her, her jaw set. “I can handle myself just fine.”

“Yes, you’ve certainly proven that on more than one occasion.” Allura smiles in spite of the situation. “But you shouldn’t have to. Not with this. We’re a team, Pidge. You don’t have to do it alone.”

Pidge wavers. Hasn’t she been saying the same thing all along to Shiro? They’re a team. No one is alone. Let us help. “I don’t think he should leave.” Allura’s shoulders sink in disappointment. “But it would be good if you visited more. Maybe try to engage him? Give him something to do to feel like there’s something he can still contribute. He needs to be busy.”

Allura’s lips purse and then open like she’s about to protest again, but then she pauses. “...that’s not a bad idea,” she slowly concedes. “He’s a pilot. He must have some astronavigation training?”

“Sure. It’s a requirement for the Garrison pilot track,” Pidge says, cottoning on to her thinking. “I mean, it’s probably been awhile since he’s had to concentrate on it seriously, but Shiro was always top of his class in pretty much everything. He can work on optimizing our route. Perhaps we can even shave off a month or two with enough plotting.” While she has a program that calculates all this already, to keep it running continuously along with their short-range scanners is a huge power drain, which is something they can’t afford. It would be much slower to perform manual calculations, but they have nothing but time now.

“Good. Then that’s settled,” Allura says, pleased. “Though it doesn’t really address my initial concerns.”

“I’ll figure something out,” Pidge says. “But I’m not giving up.”

Allura, ever the trained diplomat, knows when someone’s mind has been made up. She finally backs off. “You’re a very good friend to him.”

And that’s it.

Like clouds rolling away to reveal the sun. Pidge finally has her answer after all this time. “No,” she shakes her head. “he’s been a very good friend to _us_. The least we can do is be the same to him.”

When Allura leaves, Pidge sinks back into her chair, all the fight gone out of her and not feeling half as confident as she hoped she sounded. Her body feels leaden with exhaustion, but she knows she won’t be sleeping anytime soon.

In the ship’s dim interior lighting, Shiro is nearly camouflaged among the Lion’s interior fixtures and all her scattered detritus. She pushes herself out of the pilot’s chair and out of the cockpit. She doesn’t stop until she flops down on the ground beside him, far enough away for mutual safety, close enough that neither can pretend the other isn’t there.

She looks over to him. His face is hidden beneath his arm. There are deep burn marks across his bicep. His knuckles are bruised and split. Likely broken. “Not that I think there’s anything to be sorry for, but I know you won’t forgive yourself for this, so I guess I’ll have to say it anyway: I forgive you.”

He neither moves nor acknowledges her. She begins to wonder if he’s even there at all.

But then he says in a voice that sounds as if it has been dragged over gravel.

“You should have let Allura take me.”

Pidge leans her head back until it touches the wall, keeping Shiro in the corner of her vision. Her eyes are dried out and sore. She feels scoured clean and empty, but it’s peaceful. Without all that extra clutter in her head like fear, worry, frustration, and despair, everything is finally clear.

“I think I’ve been doing things wrong,” Pidge thinks aloud. “Trying to handle this all on my own. It wasn’t really fair to either of us.”

Slight movement. She sees a sliver of his face, one wide, bloodshot eye. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you letting me stay?”

Pidge considers the question. It’s not, _Why don’t you let me go?_ Or, _Why are you keeping me here?_

Because Shiro doesn’t want to leave. It gives her a small spark of hope. Maybe, just maybe they can still do this. “Because you’re my family. Because you deserve so much more than this.”

“I almost killed you.” Shiro swallows and looks away. “You shouldn’t forgive that.”

“Yeah, you did,” Pidge says quietly. She knows tonight will make a recurring appearance in the nightmare lineup going forward. A thread of fear will lance through her stomach every time Shiro curls his hand into a fist or gets that certain predatorial look in his eye. “And yeah, I still do. We’ll figure that out too.”

When Shiro gives her an incredulous look, she shrugs, like he accidentally bumped into her instead of tried to shatter her skull. “It’s what we do.”

 

_____

 

“What happened to your face?” is what first comes out of Keith’s mouth when his image comes up on her console. “You look terrible.”

“Hello to you too,” Pidge says, resisting the urge to touch the bruise on her cheek. It looks a lot better now than the mottled goose egg it had been. “Would you believe I was clumsy?”

“No.” Keith scowls, as if put out that Pidge would think he could even pretend to be so stupid.

“Right.” Pidge sighs. ”There was an incident.”

The thing is, Keith doesn’t ask her to elaborate. He can make already make a pretty good guess. She can practically see the litany of self-recriminations going across his brain. “This was a bad idea. I should never have asked you to take this on.”

“Why does everyone think I’m incapable of handling this?” Pidge asks, exasperated. Sure, she didn’t start out as much of a fighter or even a pilot, but she’s certainly had plenty of experience since then. She’s not someone who needs their protection anymore.

“That’s not what I think,” Keith says. “What I meant was, you shouldn’t have to. This is my problem to handle.”

“It’s _our_ problem,” she says, then frowns, irked at both Keith and herself. Shiro isn’t a problem. He’s a deeply traumatized human being, but he’s not a problem. “Maybe I want to,” she points out. “Maybe Shiro is my friend and I want to help him.”

He looks at her for a long time, assessing. She tries not to waver. Finally, he relents. “You shouldn’t have to do it alone.”

She grimaces. “Yeah, I’m starting to see that now.” It was her own pride, she reflects, thinking she could even begin to manage this on her own just because of a few Pygmy Puffs and early, easy wins. “So, going forward, I won’t be.”

“What do you mean?” Keith looks visibly wary. She doesn’t know whether to be amused or insulted. 

“Change of plans,” Pidge says brightly before she proceeds to tell him exactly what she wants to do.

 

_____

 

“Do you have any...twos?” Lance asks over the comms.

“Go fish,” Romelle says.

“...wait a tick.” There’s a distinctive pause where Pidge wonders if Lance has muted his comms to curse spectacularly before he returns. “ _How_? I think I have almost the entire deck by now! How do you not have _any_ of the cards I’ve asked for in the last ten minutes!?”

“I did have some of them,” Romelle says, matter of fact. “I thought I was supposed to tell you to ‘go fish’ after every round.”

“What made you think that? You didn’t see me telling you to go fish every time!”

“Well, I figured you were the dealer. Isn’t this game called...what did Keith call it? Poker jack?”

“...the game is literally called _Go Fish_.”

“And that’s what I told you to do!” Romelle defends.

“Argh!”

Pidge mutes the comms before another argument can break out in full force. She sees little point in doing anything other than launching right into it. She’s never been coy about anything in her life or with her team before. There’s no reason to start now.

“Shiro, I need your help,” she says before shoving a tablet into his hand. “I’ve been using a program that inputs the results of our area scans to optimize our journey, but we lack the necessary power to keep it running all the time. So, we’re going to have to start going old school, and you’re one of the few people on this team who can do it.”

Shiro stares at the tablet like she’s just handed him a pair of mittens. “You...want me to constantly run real-time calculations?”

“While I monitor the long-range scans and make the necessary adjustments, yes.”

He gives her a flat look. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Oh?” she asks innocently. She’s a terrible actor, which is another reason why she prefers to get straight to the point.

Shiro huffs, but he’s smiling a little. “Thanks.” There’s actual interest shining in his eyes when he activates the tablet. She tries not to be a little smug about it. “It’s better than video games.”

The rest of the day is finished out in near quiet. Pidge feeds Shiro a series the results of her scanners and after a few moments, Shiro tells her when to adjust their heading. He’s tentative at first, it takes him an almost excruciatingly long time to give her the first set, but eventually he grows more confident in the routine and they settle into a soothing mathematical rhythm like the mutual nerds they are.

“This is what I did on the way to Kerberos,” Shiro says quietly, interrupting their call and return pattern.

Pidge blinks, pulled away from her flashing numbers so fast that she still has spots in her vision. “What?”

Shiro almost looks embarrassed, like he hadn’t meant to speak, but now that he’s become the focus of Pidge’s attention, he can’t back out. She won’t allow it. “It was a long, boring trip out. Once you get past the asteroid belt, there wasn’t much to do, so...I had to play a few mental games with myself. I would make all these little calculations with everything I’d see. I mean, we couldn’t actually follow through, the course was already predetermined, but...it was something to do. See if we just used Mars’s gravity to propel us that much faster to shorten the trip. If we just moved a few more clicks away from that asteroid, which slowed us down by a few meters per second. Sometimes Matt would join in. We got into a lot of arguments that way. Sam eventually forbid us from playing it together.”

She can picture it. Matt likes to be contrary purely for the sake of his own amusement, and he’s smart enough for it to be easy to do. Shiro is easy-going by nature, or used to be, at any rate, but he’s just stubborn enough to have surely made their bickering prolonged and harmless enough to have driven her father crazy. Matt and her particularly excelled at it during their long car trips while on vacation or simply every night at the dinner table.

Pidge finds herself mirroring the softness in Shiro’s face. They’re fond memories. She’s glad. For Shiro, those seem to be in short supply these days.

 

_____

 

He takes to her other requests a little less graciously.

While all the Lions are relatively massive compared to the average human-made spaceship to date, their actual living interior spaces are not so much. Green’s the smallest of them all, so they have even less room to work with, but for Pidge’s carefully crafted physical regime, that won’t be an immediate issue.

“Remind me again why were doing this?” Shiro asks, grunting as he wobbles a bit.

He’s standing on one leg, on a narrow platform that barely gives him a foothold, trying to stay upright. His arm and other leg are slightly extended in a bid to maintain his precarious balance. He’s already been at it for an impressive five minutes, but now she can see the slight tremors in his leg and the glint of perspiration on his brow.

“Recalibrating your sense of balance,” Pidge says. “You need to readjust to what essentially amounts to recently deleted mass. It’ll also help with any soreness you may be experiencing because your body is so out of alignment.”

“I get that,” Shiro says tightly. “But...the Pygmies?” His eyes roll up to indicate the one nested in his hair contentedly. The others line the tops of his shoulders like those historic electricity wires Earth used to have along its streets. She might have snuck in a photo op while he wasn’t paying attention.

“It gives you an additional challenge. Don’t upset their nap by falling over,” Pidge says in her most sensible voice while studiously not looking up from her phone.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re just making that up right now?” When she doesn’t respond, he frowns, then narrows his eyes. “Pidge...did you just make that up?”

“No,” she tries to say evenly while she covertly uploads the photo to the other Lions. 

“Pidge!” Shiro loses his footing and topples to the floor. Without much to break his fall save for a clumsy, non-dominant hand, it’s a hard fall. Pygmies go flying in all directions like a carpet being beaten of its dust, vociferously protesting with annoyed chirps.

Pidge winces, shoving her phone away and moving to him to offer him a hand up. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” Shiro ignores her hand to roll onto his back in an inelegant sprawl, chest heaving. He doesn’t appear as if he’ll be moving anytime soon. “Maybe a little more out of shape than I should be.”

Compared to their days of endless drills in the Castle’s training room that were perpetuated by the very man now lying at her feet, they all certainly were, although she suspects Krolia and Keith probably had some sort of absurdly difficult daily regime set up for themselves in what limited capacity they could, if only because Krolia would demand it.

“Do you want to...um...do some sparring?” Pidge tentatively proposes. “I was going to work up to that, but….”

Her answer is bitter-steeped laughter as Shiro painstakingly pushes himself up into sitting position. “Considering my balance is shot and I keep trying to use a hand that doesn’t exist, I don’t really see the point.”

She’s a little ashamed at the sense of relief that floods through her, a hot lance that prompts her into not taking the boon offered but instead masochistically prompting, “And if our positions were reversed, what would you be saying right now?”

Shiro looks at her humorlessly.

“You’d say,” Pidge optimistically forges on, “Something about how you’ll always lose if you never even try. Or you have to start somewhere. Quitters never win, winners never quit.” She shakes her head and tries not to cringe. “Something. I just know that this isn’t something you need to give up now. It’s a setback, sure, but we just find new ways around it.”

Her hopeful note hangs in the air like a plucked string. Shiro’s gaze softens from sharp to introspective as he idly massages the muscles around his shoulder port and stares at the empty space where it should have been. “You know what’s funny? I hated that arm. I used to wish it was gone every time I looked at it. Always told myself I’d rather have no arm at all if I could.” He gives her a dry look. “Be careful what you wish for.”

Pidge grimaces. “I know. I also know that you didn’t let it stop you. You went one better and turned the tables, even.”

“The thing is, I still had a fully functional arm. It could do everything any arm could do, and then some. It still...felt like an arm. My arm, for better or worse. So I didn’t understand what this would mean. Now I do,” Shiro says, closing his eyes for a moment. The words continue tumbling out as cracked, imperfect sounds, gaining momentum at an alarming rate. “Pieces of myself are... _gone_. My arm...my body, my memories, my life…. I thought I knew what I was supposed to do, finally. It was always the plan to go out in some sort of blaze. Of glory, if I was lucky. That’s what was supposed to happen. That’s what I was ready for. Not this. Not this.”

Pidge feels frozen in place by the weight of his confession, like all the words she’s hearing form a lead ball in the pit of her stomach. “I...Shiro….”

“I’m just tired of losing and losing and wondering what will be left,” Shiro finally says. “Really tired.” He rubs his face. For a moment, Pidge is terrified he’s about to cry, but then he drops his hand and gives her a wavering grin. “Sorry. That was a lot. I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“Maybe you needed to.” She lowers herself to the ground and folds her legs beneath her. Once again, she had to look up at him. “I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we prefer it to the zone outs. We like you here. Any and every part of you. It will always be enough.”

She means to give him a shoulder bump, but sort of throws her whole body into it and ends up slouched against his arm. It barely even nudges him, but it does cause him to look down at her, something too vulnerable in his face.

“If you like me so much, then will you delete that—?”

“Eh, we don’t like you _that_ much.”

 

_____

 

And then there are his requests that she’s not so sure about.

Pidge eyes the reinforced handcuffs in her hands, taken from one of their many encounters with the Galra. They’re thick and heavy. When activated, they glow that dreaded purple. Shiro’s prosthetic arm might be able to get through them, but his natural arm has little chance. She tells him as much. “This doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“It’s the only way to ensure your safety,” Shiro says, his tone booking no argument.

It’s not his face she has to assess when she deals with him, she’s learned. It’s the way his entire body is rigid with tension despite the fact they’re both preparing for the sleep cycle, lying on the ground, remaining hand held up waiting to be restrained. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t your worst nightmares involve you being tied down and helpless?”

“Better that then making those nightmares a reality,” Shiro says. “I’ve already hurt you enough, Pidge. I could never live with myself if something worse happens.”

“How are you even going to sleep with these things on? This can’t be at all comfortable.”

“ _Pidge_ ,” Shiro says in that voice that has her already moving before she even realizes it.

She slips one loop of the cuffs around the thick railing in the wall and locks in the other around Shiro’s wrist, hoping it isn’t too tight. At least Shiro is low enough to the ground that he’ll be able to lie down fully prone. She wanted him to take the bed for some modicum of comfort, but he refused, so she gave him her thickest pillow and blanket, the latter of which he tries to better adjust beneath him using just his body.

“Uh, here, let me…” She shifts the pillow up to better align with his neck and is gratified to see some of the tension ease away when Shiro takes a deep breath and releases it with a sigh. “Will you be alright?”

“Yeah,” Shiro says, trying to give her a reassuring smile. “I guess this is as comfortable as it’s going to get.”

“I still don’t see why you won’t take the bed.”

“Pidge, we talked about this. You need the rest more than I do. It’s for the good of the team.” 

“And you don’t seem to get that you’re also a member of this team. I think you just enjoy punishing yourself.”

Shiro’s jaw clenches and unclenches as the familiar refrains of their oft-repeated argument begin. “Just...humor me this once. Like I’ve done for you.” He gives her a look that says it all. The Incidental that Shall Not Be Named, although Pidge doesn’t have a problem talking about it given half a chance.

“Fine.” But she’s not happy about it, she lets him know through her expression, which, like her mother, he seems impervious to. “But if you complain about being sore tomorrow, I’m just going to make you do more things with Pygmies.”

“Considering Lance apparently has a dedicated shared photo album now, I highly doubt collecting more blackmail material to use against me at this point is going to make much of a difference.”

“Ah…” Pidge says sheepishly. “You know about that.”

Shiro gives her another one of his patented looks.

Pidge tries to seem unaffected as she crawls into her own bed and stretches out. She has to admit, it feels good to be able to sleep fully in it again. She can curl up and burrow like a small rodent with the best of them, but she’s always been a starfish sleeper when the space allowed for it. Matt used to tease her that she was always trying to make up for her small stature, even in her sleep.

God, she misses him.

She turns her head and looks over to where Shiro is staring up at the ceiling, apparently not even attempting to go to sleep. Not that she can’t see why. His arm will start going numb soon, elevated like that.

She makes a concentrated attempt to sleep, she really does. She closes her eyes. She tries to clear her mind. Focus on her breaths. She even begins reciting Pi to herself. Nothing.

When she opens her eyes again, she looks over to see Shiro’s eyes are closed and he looks, for all intents and purposes, to be asleep, but she knows he isn’t. She’s lived with him long enough to tell the difference.

After several minutes of internal debate, she gathers her blanket and pillow and quietly moves over to his spot on the floor. Shiro startles when she plops her pillow down beside him, right against his ribs, swiftly followed by her body cocooned within her blanket.

She holds her breath, waiting for him to say something, but in the end, he doesn’t. His body relaxes beneath her head. She relaxes too, despite the floor being hard and cold. Shiro’s body is warm, like a furnace. She likes knowing he’s nearby, safe.

Space is really, really quiet. Without the constant chatter of everyone on the comms, it’s just their breathing that fills up the increasingly oppressive silence, too forcefully relaxed to mean either one of them will be sleeping anytime soon.

Finally, she can’t take it anymore. The awkwardness is like a weight pressing on her chest. She blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. “What do you dream about when you have nightmares?”

And promptly wishes she would have just repeatedly bashed her head against the floor to knock herself out instead. Stupid!

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. Forget I said anything.”

Her eyes have grown accustomed to the darker-than-dark canvas of deep space, lit only by the dim pinpoints of distant stars studded across the view screens. She can just make out his pale profile, scarred nose, lips, forehead, silvered hair. His skin is otherwise smooth and milky. _Young_. His eyes are open, having given up on all pretense, two deep wells of depthless shadows.

“It varies. Usually it’s just the familiar ones. Arena. Druids.” He swallows. She sees the bobbing movement of his throat. The new sheen in his eyes. “Lately, the new ones have been taking center stage.”

“Of...of being dead?”

“Not really. That part feels more like a dream now. I forget more and more that was what happened, and not….”

Usually, she knows better than to press. Shiro clams up, or he deflects and distracts. Maybe there’s something about the quality of the dark that lends itself to confession, though. Maybe it’s the way she can feel his chest expanding and contracting, warm and bright, defiantly alive. Maybe there’s too much spilling over now, and he’s tired of holding back the flood. “What?” Pidge prompts. 

“What this body did. What I did.”

“It wasn’t you,” she immediately says like a knee jerk reaction. “You would never have done that if you’d been in your right mind.”

“It feels like I did. I wanted to. It felt right. I wanted to end Voltron. Simple as that.” Shiro’s voice is clipped, a sharp, staccato recitation of facts to ratchet up the pulse in her throat.

The stunned silence heightens and expands like its own symphony until it can’t sustain itself, collapsing under its own weight.

“I...I really wanted to kill him.” Shiro is breathless. His words feel thick and viscous, choked out of him and drenched in palpable shame. “I really tried. I knew I was going to die. I wanted him to be with me. Not...not just because of Voltron. It was more than just Haggar’s control. It was...selfish. I didn’t care. I wanted it for myself.”

Keith never told them what happened after he dragged Shiro’s nearly lifeless clone back with him. At the time, no one even had the mind to ask, and after everything else, it hadn’t even seemed important anymore with Shiro, the real Shiro, back.

The denial burns on her tongue, huge and torrential, that she practically cuts him off. “No. Shiro, that’s not true at all! I know it feels like it was you because of the clone’s memories, but it’s not! You just have to keep telling yourself that.”

She hears Shiro suck in a shaky breath. “And if it wasn’t?”

Now she’s confused. “What do you mean?”

But Shiro stops talking.

She’s pushed too far this time, and it feels like she’s failed something important. It makes her feel sick to her stomach. “You don’t want to kill Keith,” she says reasonably, like it’s stupid she has to spell this out for him, because she can feel him, and this, whatever this is, slipping further and further away.

More silence.

And that’s it, she thinks. She’s blown it.

Disappointment burns in her throat and pounds in her chest for a long, long time in the dark. She’s no good at this. She’s failing Shiro and she’s failing Keith and she’s failing the team. Maybe she should contact Allura and ask her to take over. Shiro and her had a good relationship before as leaders carrying untold burdens.

But even the furious wave of her self-recriminations can’t last for long. Soon they, too, begin fading away into a slow and heavy torpor. Her thoughts slow down until she can’t remember thinking at all and her breaths lengthen as she eases down into sleep.

It’s the last thing she hears, so faint that she thinks she’s simply imagining it:

“I’ll ruin him too.”


	4. Chapter 4

It takes a lot of back and forth with Allura to find a system that’s both on their route and would suit their purposes, but eventually they settle on a small mountainous moon with sprawling evergreen (or at least a very close resemblance) forests, a temperate climate, and an abundance of natural resources they can take advantage of while they’re planetside. Best of all, Shiro has been so diligent about his calculations, their little diversion still put them ahead of schedule.

After an even more prolonged confinement than usual, everyone practically leaps out of their lions as soon as they land, frolicking out into the open air like dogs after the bath. Fittingly, Keith’s wolf goes absolutely nuts, flashing in and out of existence all around them like a poor connection. Shiro turns his face up to the sun and smiles, despite the way the light emphasizes the dark circles beneath his eyes. Lance even goes so far as to kiss the dirt and cuddle it by spreading his entire body on the ground. “Sweet, sweet land. How I’ve missed you, baby.”

Pidge breathes in the clean air that makes her think of the camping trips her family used to take back on Earth, looks up at the clear blue sky, and smiles with satisfaction. This should do very well.

“Plenty of varied terrain to work with, though I suspect the forest will be the most natural setting for this exercise,” Allura murmurs as soon as she sidles up next to her.

“Yep,” Pidge agrees.

“Just to be clear, we’re not to use weapons of any kind?”

“That would be correct.”

“Alright,” Allura says with less certainty, like the idea of participating in an activity that didn’t have any obvious training or enrichment value is some insane human notion that she’ll humor. “I suppose you should be the one to explain all the rules as they still rather confuse me, I must admit.”

“Don’t worry, I got it all covered,” Pidge assures her. “Remember, this is supposed to be fun.” There’s a fifty-fifty chance things will go as she planned, but even if they don’t, she doesn’t think it will go too disastrously. Probably. Like a 75% chance.

“Right then,” Allura nods to herself once, before turning to the rest of the team, “Alright, everyone. Gather around, please. There’s something Pidge would like for us to do right now.”

“Oh, come on!” Lance promptly complains. “I don’t want to have to spend my first planet break in forever testing the pH balance of the soil.”

Pidge scowls. “Funny, I thought you were the big fan of mud.”

“That’s enough,” Keith breaks in just as Lance opens his mouth for a retort, “What is it you were thinking, Pidge?”

She pushes her glasses up. “Since none of us can train as a team as much as we used to in the castle, I thought we could play a little game. It’s sort of a combination of Flag Football and Capture the Flag. I like to call it, ‘Capture the Football’...except there’s no actual football involved, so that portmanteau doesn’t really work, er...I can’t say ‘Capture the Flag’ because that’s already a thing, uh…”

“And the rules are...?” Keith asks very patiently.

“Right. Well, everyone wears one of these.” Pidge nods to Allura, who brandishes a handful of brightly colored yellow belts that can easily be unlatched with a tug. Hunk, especially, is delighted. “The goal is to capture as many of each other’s belts—or flags—as possible and be the last one standing. Once you lose your belt, you’re out and all your spoils go to the one who captured yours. We pretty much have this entire terrain to work with within, I’d say, a five kilometer radius. No weapons, vehicles, or any other tracking devices of any kind. Or,” she gives Keith and Allura a pointed look because she lives in a reality where this is a possibility, “animal assistants. Just good old fashioned tracking with our physical senses and wits. Thirty minutes to spread out and come up with your battle plan. Three-hour window total. Any questions?”

“Can we engage in physical combat to subdue our targets?” Krolia asks.

There’s a beat of silence while everyone parses the meaning behind her question. Pidge swallows. “Um, yes, I guess that can be allowed. But your goal is to steal the person’s belt...not, not incapacitate them. And no weapons.”

Krolia is, alarmingly, satisfied. “I won’t need one.”

Lance is just alarmed. “And for those of us who want to avoid being mauled to death by Galra Amazons?”

“You’ll just have to find an alternative strategy.”

Hunk actually raises his hand like he’s still in class. “Is there an option to, uh, stay on the sidelines and cheer everyone else on? Because I’m in favor of that strategy and my sense of direction isn’t, like, _great_ , soooo….”

“If you get lost, the Lions will be able to locate you. Eventually.” Ignoring Hunk’s frown, Pidge continues, “But this is a group activity. We should all participate. It’ll be fun!”

Judging by the faces of the team, Pidge isn’t sure she’s as convincing as she wanted to be, but Allura’s stern, “Alright, everyone! The countdown begins now! Thirty minutes before the hunt commences!” snaps them into action. They scatter in all directions, though most of them head for the forest, the closest geographical feature that provides them with cover.

It’s also Pidge’s first choice. She’s already thinking about her strategy. Keith and Krolia will have the advantage of being trained trackers, combatants, and hunters, plus whatever enhanced senses their Galra biology grants them. Keith used to be more impulsive and reckless, but he’s definitely outgrown a lot of that in his weird little disappearing act that apparently translated into two years. Krolia will just be _hard_ and Pidge hasn’t had the time to truly analyze her for any potential weaknesses, if there even are any aside from Keith himself. Hmmm. Worry about them later.

Lance isn’t exactly subtle, but she remembers how often he talked about climbing trees as a child. He’ll probably get to higher ground and launch guerilla attacks from afar, better to take him on up close where he’s most vulnerable. Romelle is an unknown entity, but she’s young and hasn’t been exposed to combat. Allura is smart, dangerous in combat with both her skills and shapeshifting abilities, and stubborn enough to be a challenge but when she’s pushed past her limits of patience, she gets as flustered and acts as brashly as Keith.

Hunk is strong and would be tricky to manage in close range, but get him off balance, and he’d be easy pickings. Shiro would be….

Pidge shies away from the thought. At one point, Shiro would have been a formidable challenge.

Coran first, she decides. As much as she loves him, he’s low hanging fruit.

She’d already noted the direction he’d been heading in when they first set off, and it wasn’t very difficult to pick up on his trail again considering he was practically stomping through the forest with as much grace as his beloved Yelmores.

“Huh,” Coran says distractedly to himself as he looks around the forest. “These are the perfect conditions to find Gryzwizzrs, and we _are_ in the Bythant system. I’m sure we can find one or two of those little buggers around these parts....”

It’s almost too easy.

Pidge leans forward onto the balls of her feet and braces herself for a swift and precise attack—her small size working in her favor for once—with an anticipatory grin, tensing like a coiled spring in preparation.

Only, the launch never comes, or rather, it doesn’t come from _her_ as she watches Romelle suddenly spring out from the nearby bushes in a flash of blonde hair and a victorious shout worthy of an accomplished hunter.

“Auuuuughhhh!” Coran can do little more than yelp and flail as he’s flattened into a fortunately thick pile of mud before Romelle leaps off him, holding her captured yellow belt like a trophy without a speck of mud on her.

“That’s two for two.” Romelle says smugly, and indeed, Pidge now sees she had a second belt looped around her waist as already and wonders whose it was. “I thought Voltron was supposed to consist of the most ferocious warriors in the universe, but this has been rather easy so far.”

“Why! You…!” Coran sputters before accidentally inhaling a mouthful of mud.

Pidge narrows her eyes. Oh, so Romelle thinks the paladins will be easy marks? She’ll have to teach her a lesson. Pidge readies herself for her sneak attack on her new target to garner herself three prizes in one fell swoop, but before she can so much as crouch down, she’s interrupted _yet again_.

“Coran?” Allura says as she pushes through the foliage and rushes over to him. “She got you too?” Upon seeing Coran’s poor soiled state Coran, she gives Romelle a look of wounded betrayal. “What happened to Alteans sticking together? You’ve turned against your own kind!”

“I can assure you, Allura, that young Romelle here employed very underhanded tactics!” Coran says, adding his disapproval to the mix. “I would have heard her coming, had, er, my mind not been concerned with other important matters!”

“We had a pact to target the others first, but then she got me as soon as my back was turned!” Allura adds, outrage coloring her voice.

For her part, Romelle remains completely and shamelessly unmoved, arms folded proudly across her chest. “I was given to understand this was a game where only one winner could remain. What’s that phrase Lance used? ‘Last man standing’. You’re all supposed to trained in battle tactics and strategy. Given the game’s ultimate objective, how could you not see this coming?”

Romelle merrily bounces away, long hair swinging, like a young girl traipsing through a meadow instead of merciless Altean, leaving Allura and Coran gaping in her wake. Pidge resists the urge to whistle. _Daaaaamn_. Pidge almost admires her.

She quietly distances herself from the still very irritated Alteans to revise her game plan. With her easiest target now neutralized (or shown to be harder to take down than initially theorized...which was Pidge’s own fault for forming an assumption without enough data to support it), she has to move up the chain.

She loves Hunk, she really does, but for how big the man’s heart is and how brilliant his engineering brain complimented hers so well, he has all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop and about the same capacity for guile.

He’s the next easiest to track down, doing a poor job of trying to camouflage himself in the middle of a small, lichen-like covered rock outcropping and nervously keeping watch over the world around him.

“Hey Hunk.”

Hunk jumps and emits a high-pitched yelp before swallowing the rest before it has a chance to grow into a ringing scream. Then he glances down and sees her peering up at him from a small wedge between two large rocks. “Oh. Hey, Pidge. Geez, you really didn’t have to sneak up on me like that.”

“Actually, I kinda did.”

“Um, why?”

“So I could do this.” She snakes out her hand and yanks on his flag, ripping it away.

“What—hey!”

“Thanks, Hunk!” Pidge tosses him a wave over her shoulder.

“That’s cold, Pidge!” Hunk calls after her half-heartedly, probably more relieved than anything. “Ice cold!”

Pidge smirks at her prize. One down. Onto her next target.

Two and a half hours go by swiftly as the number of competitors dwindle. Romelle’s blazing path to glory is swiftly halted by Lance carrying out his usual long range tactics of pulling off her flag with a long stick, but his crowing is short lived when Pidge takes the opportunity during his smug distraction to steal his from around his waist. It brings the number of her trophies to five.

Not bad, if she does say so herself.

She’s just about to turn her attention to the more challenging players left in the game when a blur of purple launches itself out of seemingly nowhere and barrels towards her. Pidge can’t help it: she catches the flash of sharp incisors, the subvocal growl, and eyes of deadly intent and her hand already starts for a bayard that isn’t even there. Realizing that, she does the next best thing: lets out a very justified shout and quickly whips off her flags, holding them out in front of her like a shield. “I yield! Here, take it!”

Krolia pulls up short of crashing into her, coming to a standstill like she’d been standing there the whole time. She gives Pidge a big smile that does not diminish any of her teeth and plucks the flags from Pidge’s hand. “Much appreciated, Pidge.”

“Really, Pidge?” Lance says.

“What? She’s a scary Amazon lady who probably gnawed off her mother’s breasts as a baby,” Pidge shrugs, desperately trying for nonchalant. “I know when to pick my battles.”

Even Lance, however reluctantly, has to give her that. “So all that’s left is mother and son duking it out til the bitter end? This isn’t going to last long.”

“Why do you think that?” Krolia asks.

“No offense, but there’s way too much family tragedy and melodrama here for at least one of you not to go all,” Lance waves a hand vaguely at Krolia as if to encompass the entire concept of his words, “self-sacrificial for the other.”

“If you think I’m going to go easy on Keith just because he’s my son,” Krolia says, standing straighter like she’s about to launch herself into another brawl. “You are mistaken.”

“Good, because that would just be insulting.”

Lance snorts as Keith steps out of some suitably dramatic shadows, his whole body tense and angled towards Krolia like a predator ready to pounce. Krolia smoothly slides into a similar posture, meeting Keith’s gaze and holding it. And if Pidge didn’t know they were related before, she’d certainly know now by the eerily similar feral grins they wear.

By some unspoken mutual agreement, the rest of them fall back and form a loose circle, not wanting to get caught in the crossfire but still a little too curious for their own good about how this is going to go down.

During her time as a Paladin, Pidge has been exposed to, and directly participated in, several conflicts, both armed and unarmed. She’s not the best fighter of their motley little crew, not by a long shot, but it’s never bothered her before. Still, there’s something awe-inducing about watching two trained and frighteningly talented fighters go at it, even when both are obviously holding back for the sake of their non-lethal setting.

Krolia and Keith are like two slender, sharp blades clashing with each other at a pace that is almost too fast to follow, moving like they choreographed it all beforehand, neither one missing a block or a return strike, both nimbly keeping their yellow flags out of reach from the other’s quick hand.

“Not bad,” Krolia remarks when Keith dodges another one of her attacks, executing a shoulder roll with the grace of an elite gymnast and landing smoothly back on his feet a safe distance away. “But there’s always room for improvement.”

“That was almost a compliment coming from you,” Keith says, half taunting, half sullen resentment for a mother who is difficult to please at the best of times.

“Can we do that thing where you promise to pay money on the outcome of this event?” Romelle stage whispers to Lance.

“No point when we all know Krolia’s going to kick Keith’s ass.” Lance shrugs. “Sorry, Mullet.”

Keith only has a moment to spare him a withering look before Krolia pays Keith back with a surprising sweep of his legs as he avoided a feint, and he almost loses his flag when her hand snaps out to take it as he falls. But Keith must have inherited some sort of feline DNA in whatever vault his Galra ancestry contained, because his body writhes and twists in midair, somehow managing to literally snatch away Krolia’s victory from the jaws of his defeat and land on all fours instead, putting him in a prime position to kick his leg out at Krolia’s knee.

Krolia’s leg buckles and she tries to stumble back a few steps to maintain her balance. Keith, however, is _fast_ , faster than even Pidge thought possible, launching himself from his crouched position to barrel right into her already destabilized legs, sending them both crashing to the ground.

Before Krolia could form some semblance of defense or rally for another attack, Keith reaches up with one of his long arms and yanks her flag from around her waist. “How’s that for improvement?”

A cheer goes up in the crowd. They savor victories when and where they can get them. Keith climbs to his feet and gamely offers Krolia his hand. She takes it and instead pulls him into what looks like a bone crushing hug if the little yelp Keith lets out is any indication.

“Good job besting me,” Krolia says quietly. Pidge has to strain her ears to hear it. “I knew you could. I’m so proud.”

All the rigid and tense lines in Keith’s body relax as he tentatively raises his arms to sink into her embrace. Pidge thinks she sees Hunk trying to discreetly wipe a tear from his eye. Lance starts to feign retching. Coran unabashedly bawls. Even Allura has stopped giving Romelle the stink eye long enough to be pleased.

Pidge looks down at her timer. Three minutes left. Looks like Keith’s their champ—

Except.

Pidge frantically searches the vicinity. “Um. Guys. Where’s Shiro?”

That puts an end to the feel good moment as quickly as water dousing a flame.

“What do you mean?” Keith practically growls as he breaks apart from Krolia and turns on her. “What did you do to him?”

“What did _I_ do to him?” Pidge throws back at him incredulously. “I didn’t do anything to him! He was playing the game too.”

“But you were supposed to be watching him,” Keith accuses.

“He seemed fine. He wanted to participate!”

“Oh no,” Hunk says, “Do you think he, uh, fell into one of his trances and wandered off? Into the woods? Maybe some alien spirit possessed him and walked off with his body? Can they do that here? What if he’s in trouble? What if he fell off a cliff? Or ran into an alien bear? What if he got lost?”

“What’s a bear?” Coran asks. “Is it like a Gryzwizzr?” He brightens with excitement. “If so, then certainly. Gryzwizzrs are quite ferocious predators. Aggressive too. Wouldn’t want to stumble upon one of those unawares!”

“Okay, I vote the next planet we stop at doesn’t have creatures who want to kill and eat us,” Lance says.

“I knew this was a bad idea,” Keith practically vibrates with barely restrained energy, two seconds from taking off to go find Shiro by himself. “All of this was.”

“Keith, that’s hardly fair,” Allura tries to step in. “Shiro is perfectly capable of managing on his own now.”

“Are you so sure about that?”

Allura frowns, taken off guard by the way Keith’s glare is now burning into her. “What are you implying?”

“Everyone stop! I can trace his location through the Lions. He’s going to be fine,” Pidge insists, even if it’s just to reassure herself. Ignoring the hard stares burning in her direction, she concentrates on her wrist device that she built herself. A few buttons and dial switches and the screen goes from counting down the minutes to broadcasting a steady pulsing signal, which, by all accounts, is...exactly where they are now. She looks up, brow furrowed. “Shiro’s...here?”

“Here, and, yes, I did manage on my own,” Shiro says as he walks up to their confused little group and slings his arm over Keith’s shoulders, causing the other man to stumble. There’s a smile on his face, but it doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “It seems like in the last minute concern for my welfare, you’ve all forgotten a critical lesson.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” Lance asks.

“Never underestimate your opponents,” Shiro says as he drops his arm and grabs Keith’s flag, holding it up with a little triumphant flourish as Pidge’s timer beeps, announcing the official end of the game.

After a moment of all-round stunned silence, Lance quietly whistles. “Touché.”

“You knew you’d be overlooked and discounted. You approached the game with strategy and played to your strengths.” Krolia smiles, her voice filled with the kind of satisfaction Pidge has when she’s just finished a good book. “Well played.”

“I may not be what I...what I once was,” Shiro says, earlier confidence slightly faltering. “But some things didn’t go away, at least.” His voice is soft, but there’s a glint of defiance in his eyes and an edge of steel underlining his words.

After the quiet stretches on and threatens to become awkward, Allura thankfully steps in. “Good game, everyone. Let’s restock our supplies and set up camp for the evening.”

As they begin to disperse to carry out their assigned tasks, Pidge finds herself hanging slightly back because she wants to run a few scans, not because she’s eavesdropping. And even if she is eavesdropping, it’s because she’s worried. She’s been focused on Shiro’s health for so long now, it’s second nature to be a little protective.

“I don’t think that way about you, you know,” Keith says quietly. He hasn’t moved away from Shiro’s side, but they might as well have been standing on opposite sides of a canyon with the distance that stretches between them. “I just….”

Shiro sighs. His shoulders sink and his whole demeanor starts to deflate. “I wouldn’t blame you. It’s been—everything’s been...difficult.”

“You seem more…”

“Competent?” Shiro arches a brow.

“Settled.” Keith smiles ruefully. “You played us all today and we deserved it.” 

“Pidge has been helping me a lot. She’s been really great. She refuses to give up on me, at any rate. Even when she should.”

Before Pidge can preen, though, Keith flinches. “That’s not—Shiro. I didn’t ask Pidge if you could go to Green because I didn’t want you to stay. I asked her because you were miserable on Black.” The _with me_ goes unsaid.

“It’s alright,” Shiro softly says. Pidge thinks if he still had his right arm, he’d even lay his hand on Keith’s shoulder in reassurance, yet another stark difference in the way things are now. “It was the right call. I almost killed Pidge. Twice.”

Pidge winces. So much for discretion. She knows she’ll be getting hell for it later. The admission takes Keith back, the shock and horror are writ clear across his face before he even thinks to mask it.

“I strangled her. Then I tried punching a hole straight through her head. Imagine what I would’ve done to you.” Shiro studies him like a scientist waiting for the results of his experiment, though his findings bring him little pleasure. “I’m...really tired.” His smile turns brittle. “Turns out waiting around hiding all afternoon is still pretty exhausting. Think I’ll go rest up in Green.”

He turns and leaves, and Keith doesn’t move to stop him. They both wear the same wounded expressions. Hurt. Devastation. Heartbreak.

Pidge sees them both when they don’t see each other, and it hits her.

She’s been an idiot this whole time.

She’d worried about Shiro’s mental state. She’d been operating under the assumption that more exposure to the source of Shiro’s greatest emotional stress would make things worse when he was already dealing with so much. But Shiro is strong and Shiro is starting to come back out the other side of this and it’s only as he’s now finally stepping into the light can she see it all so clearly.

It’s not hurting them when they’re together. It’s hurting them that they’re apart. 

 

_____

 

“You need to talk to him.”

Keith goes still for so long, Pidge wonders if he’s having a stroke, but before she can start checking to see if half his face is drooping, he blinks and then frowns, opens and closes his mouth, and finally settles on his default resting scowl face.

“You said that wasn’t a good idea.” Keith hunches in on himself, arms folded across his chest, head practically trying to meld into his shoulders. It probably doesn’t help that she waited until he was separated from the herd to corner him in Black.

“Look, I was wrong and I’m really sorry. I mean...yeah, I know the talk earlier didn’t go so well and yeah I might have, uh, downplayed those accidents—” Keith’s eyes widen and...oh. Oops. She wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping on that conversation, “But that’s because you two are idiots who think you’re only hurting each other when, in fact, you’re both just stupidly in love with each other. I see that now. But if you two would just _talk_ and actually admit how you both really feel, you’d both stop moping and we’d all be better off!”

Pidge takes a breath, fervently hoping she got through to him.

And she knows she’s failed when she sees that familiar stubborn gleam in Keith’s eye. “You’re wrong,” Keith says flatly. “If you heard what happened, then you know that Shiro can barely stand to look at me. I’ve already hurt him enough, and now I’ve failed him too. I should never have sent him to you. Those ‘accidents’ could have gotten you killed. I...that was on me. I failed as a leader. I failed you. I failed him—”

“ARGHHH!” Pidge grabs fistfuls of her hair and yanks. Not hard enough to actually tear the roots from her skull, as tempting as it may be, but enough to feel the pain and let it ground her frustrations. The outburst, at least, shocks Keith into silence and Pidge leaps at the opportunity. “You’re so _stupid_! I thought I was being stupid, but you’ve easily surpassed me here, congratulations!”

“Pidge!” Keith yelps when Pidge grabs his hand and starts dragging him out of his Lion. “What are you doing?”

“You’re both talking to each other. And no one is leaving Green until you’ve figured yourselves out.”

“It’s not...what? No! We already talked. He wants nothing to do with me.”

She can feel Keith start to dig his heels into the ground, refusing to move another inch. He’s so stubborn. Pidge sighs and drops her hold on his hand. “I’m really sorry about this, but desperate times call for desperate measures.” With two fingers, she lets out a shrill whistle, and to both their surprise if she is being honest, Keith’s wolf materializes between them, tongue lolling and eager. “Good boy,” she tells him. Keith really needs to give him a name. “Take us to the Green Lion!”

“What?” Keith asks. “Pidge, what are you...”

The world compresses and darkens quicker than a blink of the eye. The air shifts from the balmy twilight to the cooler, drier air of Green’s cargo hold.

“...doing?” he finishes, glaring at his surroundings, gaze finally coming to rest on an equally bewildered Shiro.

“Um,” Shiro helpfully adds.

“So neither of you are leaving this Lion until your issues are resolved. Don’t rescue them, no matter what,” Pidge directs specifically to Keith’s wolf, who, she swears, nods in comprehension before zapping off for parts unknown. She turns back to her two fellow idiots. “I’ll be in the cockpit, blasting music really loud through my headphones so I won’t have to listen to your painful attempts at using your words. Just pretend I’m not here, okay? Okay!”

“Wait. Pidge that’s not—”

“You can’t do that—”

That settled, she turns and runs for the cockpit, shutting and locking the door to their protests.

In her defense, she’s doing this for the good of the universe.

 

_____

 

Eventually, Keith grows tired of banging on the cockpit door, trying to pry open other doors, calling for his wolf, commanding Green to let them out, and even attempting to pull rank as the Black Paladin. “Seriously? What the fuck, Pidge?”

Pidge hears him fall on the bed with a frustrated groan, because she may have stretched the truth a bit when she said she wouldn’t be listening in on their conversation. For their own good. Just to make sure no one is getting hurt or dying or suddenly ambushed by a fleet of Galra warships.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into her,” Shiro says in that placating way he has when he’s trying to be diplomatic to everyone despite his own frustrations. “At least Pygmy Puffs aren’t involved this time.”

Keith gives a reluctant huff of laughter. “They were cute pictures.”

“I’ll be sure to ask Pidge to set you up with a surprise photoshoot next time.”

“Mmm, tempting, but I’ll pass.”

The easier banter dies quickly, filled in by a tired, resigned lull. Pidge half wishes she thought to install cameras in the hold for visual, before nixing that idea for its uber creepiness factor.

“Okay, fine. I guess we’re really doing this.” Keith sighs. There’s another creak of the bed when he sits up, his boots landing heavily on the floor with a thump.

“I don’t even know what we’re supposed to be doing.”

“Me either,” Keith grumbles, his voice smothered like he’s talking into his hand that is wearily running over his face. “What? You keep looking at me.”

“It’s nothing.” The answer is met with a silence so incredulous that Shiro is forced to utter a stumbling explanation, “That scar on your face. I did that. I was remembering it. I never apologized, did I? For all of it.”

Pidge imagines Keith’s fingers reflexively reaching up to touch the mark on his jaw. “You don’t have to. It wasn’t you.”

“So I keep hearing.”

“Because it’s the truth, Shiro,” Keith insists, heatedly, like it’s a particularly sore subject. “I wish you would believe it.”

His tone must take Shiro off guard. It’s a long time before he speaks. “It doesn’t feel like it,” Shiro admits. “Logically, I know what happened, but when I look at you, I remember _me_ doing that to you. It doesn’t feel like someone else.”

“Then I’ll have to keep reminding you.” There’s a familiar thread of pigheadedness in Keith’s tone. Pidge can practically see him with his jaw mulishly clenched, eyes sparking with flinty determination.

“And you think I don’t?” Shiro snaps. “Keith, I know. I just….”

“Just what?”

“Even when I know that it wasn’t me...I know what I’ve done and I know what I’m capable of, and it _terrifies_ me to think that I’m just one bad nightmare away from doing something I’d regret.”

“We can take care of ourselves,” Keith assures softly. “I’ve shown that. Pidge has too.”

“You shouldn't have to. Not from your teammate.”

“We shouldn’t have had to do a lot of things in the last two years, but we're here now,” Keith says. “You’re the one who taught us what it means to be a part of a team. Supporting each other. Protecting each other’s six. Saving each other even it’s from our own selves. We’ll deal with this like we do everything else. As many times as it takes.”

Shiro is quiet again, this time for so long Pidge worries that’s the end of their conversation, and it had been going so well. But then, finally, he quietly says, “You know, Pidge said something very similar once.”

“Well,” Keith says, “then that just confirms what I’ve said is probably really smart and you should listen to me.”

Ahh, validation. It never gets old.

This time, the silence stretches for even longer. Pidge imagines they’ve resumed staring significantly into each other’s eyes like they always used to do and has to muffle a snort.

“But I guess,” Keith says with more hesitation, “I also wanted to say that I’m sorry too.”

Shiro huffs. “You’re the last person who needs to apologize.”

“No. No, I think I do. I knew how uncomfortable you were riding along with me in Black. I didn’t know if it was me or the Lion or some combination of both. You could barely look at me. I didn’t want to cause you any more pain, but I knew you’d just sit and suffer in silence if I didn’t do something,” Keith says, voice growing thick with emotion that Pidge has so rarely witnessed from him.

It all suddenly feels too intimate and intrusive—she wanted to make sure they’d be okay, but she really shouldn’t be listening to this, should she? She’s about to actually turn on her music for real, when Shiro says, “I meant what I said earlier: you made the right call. My head was a mess. To be honest, it kinda still is.”

“But I shouldn’t have assumed. I should have talked to you about it long before now.” Keith’s voice trails off, and when it returns, it’s quieter, less touched by his entrenched stubbornness and somehow more fragile. “I didn’t mean to make you feel unwanted or useless or...you’re not any of those things. You never were.” 

“Keith….”

“You’re...uh, actually it’s very much the opposite. Shiro...I….”

“What are you saying?”

 _Say it_ , she silently urges, clenching her fists, straining. They’re so close. _Say it._

“Do you remember...everything from the fight?” Keith tentatively asks.

“I think so,” Shiro says, his thoughts taking a momentary pause for confusion before resuming their self-loathing trajectory. “Keith, the things I said...I’m sorry. They still haunt me, they….”

“It’s okay, Shiro. I know. But, uh, the things _I_ said...you remember those as well?”

“You said you’d never give up on me. You said you loved me—”

 _YES!_ Pidge silently screams, punching her fists into the air. Finally!

“—like a brother.”

Wait. What.

Seriously?

Pidge deflates in her chair, groaning before clapping her hand over her mouth. But seriously. What the hell is wrong with Keith? She’s not great with feelings but even she isn’t this actively terrible.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah. I did say that.” Keith laughs a little nervously. “In hindsight, I’m...kinda regretting that part. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Oh,” Shiro says, hurt. “Okay. I understand.”

She thunks her head hard against the pack of her pilot seat and relishes the sharp ache that radiates across her skull. Then does it again for good measure because it’s actually less painful than listening to the universe’s two biggest morons.

“I mean,” Keith says quickly, “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t mean to phrase it like that. I meant that I, that I…oh, fuck it.”

There’s another rustling noise, and then Shiro makes a startled, smothered sound that confuses Pidge for far too long before she realizes what she’s hearing. When she does, she abruptly sits up. Did Keith just…?

“You kissed me.” Bless Shiro and his penchant for the obvious.

“Yeah. Yep. I did that,” Keith says, sounding a little breathless. “I’m not really, uh, good with words, as you can probably tell. So. That’s what I really meant to say.”

Well. It was a painful ride, but he got there in the end. Pidge sighs in relief, feeling like she’s aged a decade in a matter of minutes.

“After everything that happened? The things I did, what I said….”

“I don’t care,” Keith says. “I’m never going to stop being there for you. I’m never going to stop loving you. That hasn’t changed since the day you gave me an opportunity to chase the stars instead of shutting me down like everyone else in my life.”

“That long,” Shiro whispers like he can hardly believe it.

“Maybe it’s, uh, gone through a few evolutions since then,” Keith says. “But it’s definitely landed here where all I want right now is you. Every part of you.”

Shiro releases a shaky breath. “I’m so afraid of wanting this. Keith. If I lost you too….”

“Not even death or robot monsters or a ten thousand year old empire has stopped us yet. If you can’t trust yourself, Shiro, then...trust in me. Please.”

She holds her breath, clutches the edge of her Paladin armor to feel the blunt edge dig into her palms. _Please_. _Just let yourself have this one thing for once_.

Maybe he hears her. Maybe he’s just tired of his own self-abjection. “Okay,” Shiro says so softly, she barely manages to catch it.

She feels exhausted.

It’s so quiet now that Pidge is tempted open the cockpit door and peek in, briefly wondering if they had somehow managed to find a hidden escape after all, but then there are...noises. Those muffled moans and rustling clothes and big panting gasps like they aren’t getting enough oxygen and it dawns on her what they are about to do.

Eyes wide, Pidge scrambles for her headphones and slaps them over her ears. She cues her music up and is met with not-so-deafening silence punctuated by the increasingly fervent chorus of embarrassing sounds happening behind her.

She tries again. Nothing.

“Green,” she hisses. “What are you doing, girl? Just let me play my music. _Please_.”

The lack of response she gets is decidedly smug.

“Okay, okay...I know I shouldn’t have been listening. It was wrong and I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure everything would be alright, and it is, and now I’ve really, really learned my lesson, so please, please, please play my music now,” she begs.

But Green has made up her mind to be merciless and the noises behind her are becoming more... _wet_ and Pidge panics.

“Wolf! Keith’s wolf! Please come back, boy,” she says, daring to raise her voice a little louder. “Crap. You really need a name. I’m giving you a name after this, I don’t care what Keith says. He owes me for this big time.”

In a last bid of desperation, Pidge configures her wrist device to emit a frequency she vaguely recalls is within a canine’s hearing range while praying to all her science forefathers in the universe that it also holds true for space wolves.

Keith’s wolf pops into existence beside her. Pidge throws her arms around his furry bulk and smothers her cries of gratitude into his soft fur. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou.” She pulls back before he tries to cover in her drool. “Please get me out of here, boy. There are things happening on the other side of this door that we will never be able to unhear.”

The wolf cocks an ear towards the door and whines in agreement before getting them both the hell out of there.

 

_____

 

“I can’t believe I got sexiled out of my own Lion. That hasn’t happened since the Garrison.”

If Pidge weren’t so unimpressed with the situation in which she has now found herself, she’d be marveling at the bright scarlet shade Shiro’s face has achieved. It's somehow even more red than before, like he’s been too long in the sun. There’s a necklace of mouth-sized bruises around his neck that his shirt collar can’t hope to cover up. He fidgets, something she’s never seen him do. He seems to find the floor absolutely fascinating. For his sheer size and seniority, Shiro very much resembles a little boy being chastised than their once esteemed leader.

“Is this going to be a regular thing from now on?”

Shiro winces and then tries to straighten his shoulders and spine back into Fearless Leader Mode. “Well. On Black, there’s Krolia….”

As if he’d accidentally invoked an ancient curse, Shiro twitches and his eyes nervously dart around Green like she’s lurking in the shadows and waiting to give him the shovel talk. Pidge can’t entirely blame him. Krolia is somehow more frightening than any other Galra she’s ever known, Zarkon and Sendak included. Shiro would probably agree.

When he’s certain Krolia isn’t popping out of the metalwork anytime soon, Shiro relaxes. Truly, Pidge observes. The tight line of his mouth eases into something genuinely content. There are still dark circles under his eyes from far too little sleep, but his gaze is present, sharp, warm, and laser focused just like she always remembered it. He looks like he is finally _here_ , with her.

“I guess it’s good you and Keith finally figured it out,” she grudgingly allows. “You seem happier.”

Shiro looks down, abashed. A faint smile can’t help but touch his lips. “He really is too good to me.”

“Yeah, really good in bed, from the looks and sounds of it.”

Shiro flushes again. “I’m sorry. We sort of forgot you were there. But in all fairness, you were the one who locked us in there in the first place.” The implication, _Honestly, what did you expect?_ , lingers.

And, well, she did actively encourage, on multiple occasions, orgasm-induced endorphins as a way to manage his mental health. It’s not like she can put a stop to this without being a hypocrite.

Which means she’s going to be routinely sexiled. She'll have to hang out with the Alteans on Blue, watching Romelle swindle the mice out of all their crackers. For the good of the universe.

She rubs the sore skin on the bridge of her nose beneath her glasses. “Two visits. Two per week. And you thoroughly wash those sheets after. And sterilize all surfaces within a three meter radius. _Don’t_ traumatize the Pygmies. They’re innocent.”

Shiro scrunches up a brow and presses his lips together, and Pidge will absolutely fight him on this if he tries to protest, but all he says is, “That’s fair.”

“And you take the bed again on every other cycle.”

“We can switch off,” Shiro proposes, which is a lot better than a flat out masochistic refusal. “But I still need to be restrained.”

“No, that’s not…” There’s that hard look in his eye. He won’t compromise on this one. “Fine,” she reluctantly agrees. “We continue your rehab—”

“No more Pygmies.”

“—sans Pygmies. And,” she adds, “you help me convince Keith that his wolf’s name should be Kosmo.”

Shiro blinks. “Kosmo?”

“Yes. With a ‘K’. Krolia, Keith, and Kosmo. It’s perfect. We don’t mess with perfection.”

“Did Lance come up with that?”

“How could you think Lance could come up with something so good?” _Kosmo_ is very much her idea, thank you very much.

Finally, Shiro slowly nods. “...okay, fine. I’ll...try. I make no guarantees as to the outcome of that discussion though. Keith really feels strongly about, um, Kosmo, being his own man. Er, wolf.”

“Well, he’s not going to have much of a choice in the matter if we all start doing it.” She sticks out her hand. “Alright then. We have a deal.”

...and realizes she’s using her right hand. They both eye it like it’s a questionable creature that’s been served to them at some alien planet’s welcome banquet. “Sorry. Right-handed.” Cheeks burning, she quickly switches to her left.

“I am too. Or, was.” Shiro reaches out. His left hand is a contrast of fine, elegant fingers and obvious brute power. Thick white scars hatch his knuckles. It gently swallows hers up, reassuring. “It’s okay.” Shiro smiles softly. It really is. “Well...it’s getting there.”

There are still months left until they reach Earth. From past experience, she suspects it’s not going to be an uneventful nor easy journey. There will still be bad days of worthlessness and despair. Shiro will still have his night terrors and occasionally her dreams will wander there as well. There are still the remnants of the Galra Empire to contend with. Worryingly, they still can’t get a hold of any previous allies nor any Rebel base when they should have been able to get into contact with _someone_ by now. 

But facing down overwhelming odds has always been the story of their lives, and right now, Pidge feels like they’re finally on the right side of yet another battle.

“Yeah, we’re getting there.”


End file.
